walnut oil

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Solving a painting problem with a velatura

23 November 2008 in art materials, art technique, demo/in progress by David | No comments

White Shirt

Here’s where the “White Shirt” paint­ing is at. What I’ve done is fin­ish ini­tial ren­der­ing of each area of the shirt. I found that the hues were uneven—I am still learn­ing to man­age near-neutrals across rel­a­tively large areas of a paint­ing. What I tried was to glaze trans­par­ent yel­low oxide across bluer shadow areas, which evened out hues some­what, but the over­all paint­ing was uncon­vinc­ingly yellow-orange. I had also over-rendered much of the shirt, with too broad a range in value between darks and lights.

This was a per­fect time to apply a velatura.

Tak­ing a hint from Tad Spur­geon, I mixed up a batch of putty. This was cal­cite (ground mar­ble dust) mulled with wal­nut oil and a bit of stand oil. The result­ing mix­ture was a dull grey with the con­sis­tency of, well, oil paint. Putty is a medium used to increase the trans­parency of paint, since the cal­cite is essen­tially invis­i­ble in an oil vehi­cle. This is bet­ter than adding a lot of oil or resin, as the calcite/oil mix­ture is as strong and as resis­tant to dis­col­oration as oil paint.

I mixed the putty with lead white (Doak’s flake 1C) in approx­i­mately equal amounts. Then I added a very small amount of neu­tral gray paint (ivory black and burnt umber) which I had pre­vi­ously tubed. I now had a very light gray, rel­a­tively translu­cent mixture.

I oiled out the sur­face of the paint­ing with a thin layer of wal­nut oil, which is very slip­pery and less yel­low­ing than lin­seed. I applied the gray mix­ture to the sur­face. Ini­tially, it looked awful—my care­ful paint­ing was cov­ered with flat gray. With a stiff bris­tle flat, I started work­ing at adjust­ing the thick­ness of the velatura layer, pulling the under­paint­ing out. I found that it was effec­tive to moisten the brush with a bit of wal­nut oil. It took awhile, but even­tu­ally the under­paint­ing began to show through, with the value range com­pressed toward the gray value of the velatura and the hue pulled toward neutral.

It needs a bit of work once the velatura layer has dried to restate a few high­lights and dark accents, but over­all this was a suc­cess­ful exercise.

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Mixing oils

11 November 2008 in art materials, art suppliers by David | No comments

Alex writes,

I love the M. Gra­ham water­col­ors, so I am going to start there, but, I won­der: Can I use lin­seed oil with them as a brush cleaner with­out degrad­ing the qual­ity of the wal­nut oil? (Lin­seed is SO much more cost effective.)

Thanks, Alex. I’m not aware of any tech­ni­cal rea­son not to mix lin­seed with M. Gra­ham oil paints (which are ground in wal­nut oil). M. Gra­ham would much pre­fer that you buy oil from them, but inex­pen­sive lin­seed will work just as well and is exactly as nat­ural and non­toxic (don’t buy boiled oil or other hard­ware store lin­seed oil).

In fact, two of my favorite paint mak­ers—Robert Doak & Asso­ciates and Blue Ridge Artist Mate­ri­als—grind their paints in a linseed/walnut blend. You might want to check them out. M. Gra­ham is of mid-range qual­ity while theirs is high-end, but not all that much more expen­sive. All three brands are extremely smooth and brush­able. You could mix paint from all of these brands together with­out any problems.

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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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