When the weather isn’t good enough for painting dead trees I have been experimenting with a medium I did once in my ‘A’ level then never touched again – oil painting. I need to be able to work all year round, and maybe get commissions so oil painting is a massive scary new frontier for me.
I did choose to paint in a related medium – acrylics – so it’s not all totally new to me, but certainly all these different mediums – liquin! impasto! turpentine! linseed oil! sansodor! stand oil! makes my head spin as much as when I’m high on white spirit fumes. Which has also happened, I hate that stuff so I’ve been trying ‘clean spirit’ and I can report it works pretty well (for cleaning brushes, I’d not use it for thinning paint).
Luckily most of my paints from 28 years ago work fine, amazingly. I bought some Georgian paints for my course, and then my mother gave me a box of Winton paints a little later. I didn’t know what state they were in, so thankfully those kind guardian angels also gave me a Georgian Oil Painting set – for which I used the Daler Board and some of the paints for this. It’s been indispensable for the colours that I’m missing.
Like watercolour or acrylic if they don’t go hard, they’re fine – they might separate a bit, but you just mix them back in. I had my original mostly-used Titanium White go hard, and the Georgian Cadmium Red has gone rather thick as had the given tube Georgian Titanium White (seems to be a common problem with those colours actually).
All the two decade plus Winton ones were fine, which is a massive bonus point for them!
I’ve asked over at Wet Canvas and the consensus is you can just add more oil and it seems to work (no safflower though, so used linseed, I’ll risk the yellowing). I might gets some empty tubes and do it properly though, with a palette knife…but I just used a stick and some linseed oil and mixed it in the tube. We’ll see.
As regards the painting, well I started with brown underpainting – how Rembrandt of me – and rather liked that painting actually. I made a massive mistake here – somewhere on the internet a bleeping idiot said to underpaint with linseed oil. DO NOT DO THIS.
Well you can, just be prepared to wait nearly a week for it to dry and that was next to the dehumidifier *sigh* I forgot unlike other oils like turpentine, sansodor etc which speed drying up, linseed actually slows it down. Duh. As a result I started painting the second part too early as I’m impatient – this is why I usually use acrylics – into the wet underpaint. Again, maybe don’t do that…it got a bit muddy as a result. That said, if it’s good enough for Van Gogh and Rembrandt – it’s called alla prima or ‘wet on wet’ painting. I might explore that. But yeah, at this early point doing my second only ever oil, we don’t want mud.
Kind of reeled it back after the Long Dry, and painted with turpentine for In Progress #3, and then after showing that to some art friends, one of them (thanks Sue!) mentioned Liquin.
Not sure if it was around when I first did oils, but it’s an alkyd medium you add to your paints to make the brushwork smoother (or more thick, with the Liquin impasto, want to get some of that as well) and dries quicker.
How long do oils dry you might wonder? A long time.
OK, maybe a bit more info, with normal oils I’ve heard it can take upto 2 weeks to be touch dry/be able to paint over especially using linseed, 2-3 days at best if you’re using thin layers or it’s really warm/dry (or you stand it next to a dehumidifier, and I still wonder if that first layer is still wet under there – this could crack in future!).
Oils take upto 6 months or more to completely dry all the way through which is why they can’t be varnished immediately…. Some really heavy impasto paintings from decades ago are still not dry inside apparently….so it does depend how thickly you use your paint. (Umm…I’m not a tiny dabs of paint or thin glaze person!)
With Amazing New Liquin *pow star graphic!* it can be 8-10 hours allegedly. Bollocks to that, it was actually more like 12-24, but still way faster than the normal oils. It’s weird gloopy stuff, don’t like how it feels on the brush, but it’s amazing stuff. You can also get alkyd paints that already have the medium in, they are still oil paints but dry fast. Well fast-er. Also they take 30 days to completely dry for varnishing according to Winsor & Newton. I’m not going to test that.
The only caveat is longevity – these new mediums haven’t been around centuries unlike the traditional mediums. But hey, I’m still learning…and don’t have the luxury of space for paintings to be drying for weeks!
In fact talking of those paints, I got a few tubes and produced a verdaccio underpainting with them (how I know it’s more like 24 hours, this was still tacky 12-16 hours later, I was using it thicker though, ironically with more Liquin to try and make it thinner, maybe I should have used turpentine? Not sure it’s compatible.)
Verdaccio is an interesting form of underpainting because unlike monochrome underpainting like grisaille it’s the complement of flesh-tones, a browny-green, ‘green earth’. This should make the layers of flesh tones above shine as they react with the underpainting below them – it’s an early Renaissance technique, and apparently they help the pinks/reds look less intense and unrealistic as well. Also painting in a limited/monochrome palette does help you focus on tones.
So here’s a sneak peak of the next self-portrait – yes the green is meant as an underpainting, not some zombie/Hulk portrait! A friend wants me to leave this, but not with those scary eyes. Been freaking people out with the portraits with unfinished eyes as is…
Oh and I’m not sure if the first self-portrait is totally finished yet, but it’s finished for now.
Leave a Comment! Be nice….