Studio Products

In the comments to this post, Jeff writes:

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.

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I’ve tried many painting mediums, but I keep coming back to this formula that I wrote about on the first day of posting here. Canada balsam and stand oil 50/50, then add oil of spike until it flows easily.

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.

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In painting jargon, a medium is something you add to paint to change it’s handling properties, drying time, gloss, transparency, or other characteristics. Here’s the recipe for my current favorite general purpose oil painting medium.

Combine equal parts Canada balsam, black oil, and oil of spike. Warm just enough to allow the incredibly thick and sticky Canada balsam to go into suspension with the other ingredients. Shake before using. Mix a very small amount into your paint to make it brush out more easily, adhere better to the previous layer, and dry more quickly. Keep covered to limit evaporation (you can add a touch more spike if it gets too thick).

Canada balsam is a sap from fir trees. Balsams improve adhesion from one paint layer to another and impart a certain silky smooth quality to paint. Canada balsam is clearer and faster-drying than other balsams, such as Venice turpentine. It also costs a lot more.

Black oil is linseed oil cooked with litharge (lead monoxide). Black oil is faster drying and more slippery than linseed oil. Like many art materials, it’s poisonous, so you need to be careful not to ingest it.

Oil of spike is an organic solvent like spirits of turpentine, except that it is more slippery and evaporates more slowly. It has a very strong and wonderful smell (and is much more commonly used in aromatherapy than painting), although my wife doesn’t like it. It has a long history in oil painting; Leonardo probably used it for the initial dark washy underpainting in his “sfumato” technique.

N.B., you can get all of these specialty artist’s ingredients from Studio Products.

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