What would you recommend as a good source for purchasing canada balsam / stand oil / spike?

First let me note that these are natural materials. Any supplier can get a bad batch. That I got quality stuff five years ago does not guarantee that you will get high quality materials from the same company now. That’s the nature of the market.

That being said, if you want to get Canada balsam, spike, and stand oil, these are suppliers I’d recommend taking a look at:

• Studio Products. I’ve purchased all three of these ingredients from these guys and the quality has been excellent.
• Sinopia. Great pigments and other supplies. They are now the sole distributor for the European art supply company Kremer.
• Natural Pigments. They sell some stuff made by Studio Products and many other art supplies, including a line of oil paints made with some very old-school pigments. They also sell heat-bodied oil in various viscosities. Stand oil is one grade of heat-bodied oil. That would allow you to experiment, if you liked.
• Kama Pigments. They have Canada balsam (at a very good price) as well as oil of spike (which they call lavender oil). I have never ordered from them, but have heard good things from others, despite the truly awful design of their web site.
• Robert Doak and Associates. They have various pre-made mediums, as well as balsam, spike, and stand oil. Don’t let Robert tell you what you have to buy from him.

Note that you should not have to buy a lot of medium supplies, because you should not add much medium to your paint. Unless you are making a lot of paintings, which would be excellent.

Please share any experiences you might have with these suppliers or other places to get these materials.

Just a tiny bit of this medium mixed into oil paint improves brushability remarkably. And it smells wonderful.

To give proper credit, the recipe comes from Rob Howard of Studio Products.

Some people are specifically sensitive to spirits of turpentine, but are able to use alternate solvents such as oil of spike. Others are very sensitive to aromatic solvents, but are able to tolerate modified substances such as odorless mineral spirits. (I don’t like using OMS with oil paints because I don’t like the way they interact with paint. I also have a slight skin sensitivity to mineral spirits.) Note that not all spirits of turpentine are the same. Most modern gum turpentines are made from boiled tree stumps, which makes a nasty-smelling product. Look for stuff that doesn’t have a foul odor.

But there are some individuals who just can’t be around any of the solvents that are useful for oil painting. And even people with no sensitivity may find themselves taking a class or in some other situation in which solvents are not allowed. I think it’s useful, therefore, to discuss strategies for working with oil paint without solvents.

I’d first like to note that, for the first 100 years of oil painting, there is scant evidence of solvent use. Paintings from that period often exhibit very fine detail, demonstrating that just about any sort of painting in oil is possible without solvents. Since those paintings have often lasted very well (without excessive cracking or yellowing), it also demonstrates that multi-layered solvent-free painting can be done without having to dilute the paint with excessive oil or by egregiously violating the principle of fat over lean.

Water miscible oil paints

I’ve written about these convenience paints before. They are made with oils that have been chemically modified so that they are mixable with water. I don’t use them for three reasons. First, while it is possible to dilute them with water, it’s not a good idea to paint with a lot of water added because that can disrupt the binding strength of the paint. Second, since adding water makes an emulsion, dark-colored paints with water added become a bit lighter, then darken as the water evaporates. Third, because water miscible paints are mostly marketed to amateurs, the paints are mostly not of the same quality as artist-grade oil paints. For these reasons, I personally don’t find water miscible oil paints to be a good strategy for oil painting without solvents.

M. Graham paints

There is one company that has achieved some success by promoting a solvent-free strategy with their products. M. Graham is the only manufacturer, so far as I know, that makes all of their oil paints with walnut oil. They suggest the avoidance of solvents in favor of diluting the paint with walnut oil or with their faster-drying walnut oil alkyd medium. They tend to promote the idea that using their paints, with their special solvent-free methods, is safer. I’ve head of demonstrations they do in which company representatives use their walnut medium to cook with. It’s true that walnut oil is safe, but their marketing is also a bit misleading. All of the other oils used by their competitors are also safe, and you can cook with any of them. While their paints are well-made, there is nothing about them that is particularly more suited to solvent-free painting than any other oil paint. Any of the solvent-free painting methods described in their product literature will work just as well with other brands of paint and with plain linseed oil.

Using regular oil paints without solvents

There isn’t any one approach to solvent-free painting. The most appropriate methods will depend to some degree on your style of painting and which materials you feel comfortable working with. Here are some ideas:

• Use paints that are smooth and creamy, not thick and pasty. Avoid brands like Old Holland and Williamsburg which, while of high quality, are often difficult to work with without dilution. Instead, use paint brands like Doak, Studio Products, and (notwithstanding what I said above) M. Graham. These paints are more like fresh-mulled paint and are far easier to work with without additives.

• For the initial layers of a painting, use lean mediums that contain no solvents. Emulsions using egg yolk, hide glue, and small amounts of oil are very lean and can be effective, fast-drying dilutents for oil paints if you prefer initial layers to be loose and easy to apply. I sometimes make a medium consisting of 3 parts egg yolk to 1 part black oil or linseed oil, for example. It can be slightly diluted with water and, mixed with oil paints, allows free application of a lean underpainting layer. Tad Spurgeon provides this recipe:

If you want to use your regular oils without solvent you can create an emulsion using 1 part egg yolk and 2 parts warm glue solution (3T glue to 2c water, above) and paint with that on panels. The emulsion will set as it cools but still be workable: you can add a bit more water if this feels too thick: warm slightly and shake it well to re-emulsify. You can also add a bit of oil to this (first, before the water) and/or a small proportion of one of the water soluble wax products sold for tempera. You can also emulsify Canada Balsam or Strasbourg Turpentine into this but I developed this for students who paint in community places where solvents are forbidden and felt that might cause problems. I’ve actually ended up like the simplicity of the egg yolk and glue: it sets up very quickly, holding the pigment although the oil is still wet. If you feel like you’re working too tightly you might enjoy a few sketches in this stuff.

• For upper layers of a painting, add very small amounts of oil (I prefer linseed oil or black oil) to the paint in order to get it to flow more freely. It doesn’t take much, especially when using one of the paint brands recommended above.

• Do initial layers of a painting on panel in egg tempera or tempera grassa. You can then glaze over the initial very lean layers with oil paint (to which you can add a small amount of oil when necessary).

• Paint with a wax-based medium such as this one from Studio Products.

• While painting, clean your brushes with linseed oil. Dip the brush in oil, wipe with a paper towel, repeating until the brush is sufficiently clean. At the end of a session, clean your palette with a paper towel dipped in oil and your brushes with soap and water.

• Keep your paint warm. I’m not kidding. Warm oil paint flows a lot more smoothly than cold oil paint. You can keep paint on a glass palette on top of an electric hot plate. Just be careful never to use an open flame or an exposed heating element near oil paint or any solvents.

• You can thin your paint with an alkyd-based medium such as Liquin or Galkyd. I don’t like alkyd mediums for multi-layer painting. I also hate the way they smell, so I don’t use them.

There is no reason why you can’t paint effectively with oils without solvents, although you will have to adjust your materials and methods. You will have some limitations, but they are not so severe that you will need to give up painting in oil.

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.

I think that’s a false economy. I believe that, in order for paintings to be thought of as valuable, they should be made from fine materials using excellent craftsmanship. Imagine if a maker of handmade violins thought that balsa wood was just as good as a good hardwood, or that generic spray varnish produces just as good a finish and tone as a properly prepared resin varnish. That would not be an “innovative” way to save money on violin-making supplies. Working like that could possibly produce a violin that looks OK, and maybe it could even sound OK, but it would not be an object of craftsmanship.

I’m not an elitist. I have limited money to spend on art materials, too. I buy inexpensive Venice turpentine from a tack shop instead of the costly stuff from the art store, because it seems to be the same stuff and is a lot cheaper. I make my own traditional gesso panels because I can’t afford to have the guys at Real Gesso make them for me (theirs are better than mine).

I understand the desire to come up with personal solutions that feel more clever than the fancy stuff in the art store. But hardware store boiled linseed oil is junk. It’s made for tasks like protecting the wooden handle of a gardening tool from the elements, not for making permanent artwork. Adding a little bit of cheap oil (or leftover bacon grease) to your paint won’t make it explode. Painting on latex house paint “gesso” may not cause noticeable problems. The painting may last long enough, under decent conditions. And it is certainly the case that most of us will never produce a masterpiece that will deserve to hang in a museum 200 years from now.

But I can’t make paintings that way. Using house paint, cheap boiled oil, or any other junk material makes me feel like a hack, not a craftsman. Decent materials are not that expensive. And while junk materials may work out OK, they may well not, and they may cause a good painting to fail prematurely. Plenty of 19th century painters discovered that when they forgot the traditions of craftsmanship and just used whatever seemed to work they often got paintings that didn’t last. While I sometimes hear anecdotal stories about any number of weird materials being used with “no problems so far,” my own bias is to use quality materials from companies I trust, not jury-rigged stuff that is “just as good.”