Beginning The Grove August 4, 2023 13:02

I've been spending a lot of time experimenting, but after all that, I've decided that what I like painting most are trees, skies, and water. Not necessarily as traditional landscapes but as subjects in themselves. My most recent painting, The Old One, really showed me how much better I paint with that sort of subject and also gave me plenty to think about in terms of experimentation with texture and color. So I started the next tree painting by painting over the gesso with Michael Harding's Transparent Oxide Red. I think this is the most wonderful transparent red iron oxide I have come across. I hope it will give a nice glow to my painting. 

I've been adding Michael Harding oil paints to my stash for a while now. I love the rich colors but even more I love their squishy quality. They are so much easier for me to paint with. I think the only paint I've found that's similar in squish is Blockx, and that's just too expensive and slow drying due to the poppy seed oil. If I had a large studio, I wouldn't mind the drying time because I could keep five paintings in rotation like I used to. But my place is tiny and I don't anticipate having either more room or a separate studio any time soon. So instead, I will use up all the Williamsburg, M. Graham, and Winsor Newton paints I have and gradually switch over entirely to Michael Harding. 

I've also got a ton of Princeton Select brushes in my Blick cart that I hope to purchase in a couple of weeks when I get my royalty payment. I went through my oil brushes the other day and tossed everything that was splayed, had hardened paint under the ferrule, or was just trashed due to my negligence. That meant about 3/4s of my brushes. I noticed that my Princeton Select brushes have stood the test of time really well. I also like the Bristlon brushes I got recently, but I haven't had them long enough to tell how well they will wear, so Princeton Select it is. I have also seen artists I admire using them. 

Paints and Painting Mediums March 26, 2023 11:05

Recently I decided to switch to a different paint brand. I've got a ton of Williamsburg paints, but a year or so ago, I coveted a tube of Michael Harding Scarlet Lake and bought it for myself as a treat. Well, I loved it. And it was not only the color I loved, but the paint consistency--smooshy without it leaking oil all over. It was just so easy to manipulate, especially compared to the Williamsburg paints I have. They are wonderful and come in a jillion colors, but for me they are a bit stiff. I've always had to add things to them to suit me, usually some walnut oil.

Then I discovered Siccatif de Courtrai, which i've written about. This does affect the consistency slightly because it's based on (real) turpentine. Even though you add just a couple drops per blob of paint on your palette, it helps make the paint be a little more spreadable. It still wasn't enough to make it as spreadable as I would like, but a couple years ago I tried oiling in or oiling out--applying a very thin layer of oil on dry paint, then wiping it off so only a whisper of oil is left. This made it much easier for me to paint some details, although with some pigments, like prussian blue, it would make them bleed across the canvas. I had no idea how much it could extend drying time.

I still had the problem of never having a brush that was stiff enough to move the paint around but not so stiff it would leave tracks. Sheesh.

In February, I came into a little money thanks to a crypto gift, and I used $200 of it to buy a bunch of Michael Harding paints. They have completely changed how I paint.

Because yes, they are smooshy, for the most part (except the titanium), and so they really suit how I want to paint. And the colors are drenched. Gorgeous! Yes, they are more expensive than Williamsburg, but they are totally worth it for me.

At the same time, I found some brushes, quite cheap, that I like--Bristlon Silver. I never usually use rounds, but I bought some to do details. They are great for that. They keep their points but aren't so stiff that they feel like a broom. They work great with the Harding paints and I know I will get more of them. I especially want to add some filberts now, as all my filberts are in ragged shape, partly due to me cleaning them in a stupid way.

I started a new painting and after doing the drawing, I started painting without remembering to oil in first. Because of the consistency of the Harding paint, I found that I did not need to. Wow!

I also found that the paint had dried the next day. I was shocked. I checked and found that none of the pigments I had used were fast driers. I thought it might be a one-off, some kind of accident. But it wasn't. This has been the case day after day. Using just the Siccatif de Courtrai and no oiling in or added oil, the  Harding paint is very spreadable in use and still dries the next day. 

This is life-changing in terms of my painting. And it comes after trying a number of different mediums in an effort to get away from using the Siccatif, since it has turpentine in it and my place is tiny now and has only two windows instead of eight. I need to have the fan on and both windows open when I paint (and for hours afterward) to ensure there is no buildup of turpentine fumes. I actually like the smell of the real thing, unlike the disgusting formaldehyde-ridden crap that I've purchased from reputable art suppliers. But I know it's toxic and it does irritate my lungs. As for other solvents, no need to go there. 

In terms of mediums, I tried sun-thickened poppy oil I made years ago (it's really thick now), poppy oil with driers, and heat-treated walnut oil, and none of them really improved drying time at all compared with what would be the case with the untreated oils. I really dislike the smell of oxidizing linseed oil, so I don't consider that an option in medium form, although as a binder in my paints, it doesn't bother me. 

I still have a couple more mediums to try (for instance, I bought some cobalt to add to oil), but now I have the possibility of not having to use mediums at all, just paint straight from the tube. As soon as I finish this painting, I will give that a try. 

Work in progress 5/5/21 May 5, 2021 11:41

The initial layer of this painting was a bunch of ripples made with some ultramarine pigments, just because I don't usually use them. They are just sitting there in their tubes and maybe hardening. So I figured to use some of them, together with the siccatif I bought. But I used poppy oil as a medium instead of walnut oil, so that layer took a long time to dry compared to the paintings I started with walnut oil, especially because I put a bit of impasto into it. 

Finally it dried, and I took it out this morning to work on it. Funny how turning things on their side can show you completely different possibilities for a painting. Began to apply some WN Winsor Yellow (PY74) into the center folds of the painting because the yellow + purple made me think of irises and therefore spring, and it's spring, but also I had just seen a call for a watercolor (NOT oil) competition having to do with spring. 

But I also had some lithopone (Williamsburg's Porcelain White) lying on my palette from a previous painting and thought what the hey, might as well use this. And it just growed. I added highlights with titanium. 

Right now this is tentatively titled "Between the Waves." It's 16 x 20" oil on canvas with a traditional 7/8" profile. I was a little concerned about this batch of canvases, because in the past I have sometimes found that the thinner profiles on cheaper canvases can be warped, but so far I've had luck with these Blick Premier traditional profile canvases. I do love the Fredrix Pro-Dixie canvases (which I think only come in the traditional profile), but they are almost twice as much as these. I know I want to do a LOT of painting right now, so I am going to use these. 

I really like painting watery or cloudlike images. I'm thinking of doing some series along those lines, which someone on Instagram recommended to me. Thanks!

Siccatif de Courtrai May 1, 2021 13:33

I mentioned Siccatif de Courtrai a couple days ago as a 19th-century paint drier containing lead and manganese that I'd bought some time ago and decided to actually try using. I hadn't used it before because I had been spooked by lead and really, I'd found that by using walnut oil and keeping 5 or more paintings in rotation, I always had something dry I could work on and didn't really need it. I had a separate studio then and so I had plenty of room to store paintings drying.

But now I don't have a separate studio and have way less room for drying paintings, though I am utilizing the space above my T5 plant lights, which get warm but not hot. Still, I felt like it was a good time to check out the various driers I have. I decided to try Siccatif de Courtrai first, not least of all because only one drop was necessary per paint glob. I thought I could deal with that much lead and manganese.

This stuff is supposed to be problematic on linseed oil, causing it to wrinkle, but it is said to work well on paint using walnut or poppyseed oil. Although I had plenty of paints made with linseed oil, I typically have used walnut oil in a solvent-free painting method. I've used poppyseed oil mostly as a finish and a sun-dried version at that. 

But the first painting I tried the siccative with, I decided to try painting with regular, NOT sun-dried poppyseed oil, since I have a bunch from a while ago. Although the siccative is supposed to render a relatively thin layer of paint dry in 8-12 hours, that was not the case with the paints to which I added poppyseed oil. In fact, the paint was still wet two days later. Disappointing. I should say I did NOT put a layer of poppyseed oil with siccative to start the painting. I think this might have made a difference.

Yesterday morning, I decided to try it with a painting where I used walnut oil as the medium. This is not any special walnut oil, not heat-treated or sun-thickened but just out of the bottle from Spectrum (although I also have a gallon jug from Jedwards, although you can get a sun-thickened walnut oil from Kremer). I started with a layer of oil+siccative that I applied and wiped off and then painted into, then added one drop of siccative to each paint glob on the palette plus the walnut oil, maybe five drops, which is about as much oil as I usually use.

Amazingly, by the end of the day, the thin parts of the painting were actually dry, and this morning, the whole painting is entirely dry. This is faster than the walnut alkyd I was using, which gives me a headache. This stuff doesn't give me a headache, although it has something of a smell. I'm thinking it has turpentine in it.

The Siccatif de Courtrai I'm using is by James Groves and contains lead and manganese. He makes all sorts of other interesting stuff, some of which I have, like Gentileschi amber medium and the drying walnut heat-bodied oil (which he no longer makes). I will no doubt end up trying these and other of his products, since this siccative has been so successful.

Other companies also make this siccative, but they mostly seem not to include lead or manganese. For instance, I noticed that the version by LeFranc & Bourgeois comes up first in search results, but their "white siccatif de courtrai" doesn't contain manganese, from what I can see, and their newer version of it doesn't contain lead either but instead uses zirconium and calcium. Their brown siccatif de courtrai is/was supposed to contain lead and manganese, but I have not seen it for sale. Sennelier also makes a version, but likewise without either lead nor manganese. In fact, from what I can see, a number of companies make a version of siccatif de courtrai that contains zirconium and calcium instead of lead and manganese. So, not at all the same thing as what I am using, despite the name.

I saw one remark out there that said that this size bottle of siccative would be used up in one underpainting, but all I can say is that the canvas in such a case would be the size of a barn. This is for using at one drop per nut of paint. I think it's going to last me a while, and when I use it up, I should be able to get another bottle for twenty bucks, which is reasonable, IMO.

I'm going to slowly push the envelope with this siccative in terms of paint thickness, since I do like to have a certain blobby quality in some paintings. It would be great if this stuff shortened the drying time for that.

Demon Work In Progress April 30, 2021 10:37

A while ago I bought a Sennelier pigment mixture called King's Blue, which is PW6 (zinc white), PB29 (ultramarine blue), and PV16 (manganese violet). I never usually buy convenience mixtures, but I remember that at that time I was beginning to move away from strictly single pigment paints. There were just some color mixtures out there that looked too scrumptious to resist, and this King's Blue was one of them. It's a pinkish blue that makes me think of dusk. 

And I thought I'd be using it precisely to paint the "blue hour" in landscape, because I was still painting plenty of landscapes in oil at that time. But I left off doing that when I switched to watercolors, feeling like landscape was trapping me. And I was fascinated by what watercolors could do for abstraction. 

Starting back with oils again, I actually did paint a landscape (which is drying so that I can go on and add lots of glazes to it), but since then, it's been abstracts. 

When I sat down to paint this morning with a blank canvas, since my other stuff wasn't dry enough to work on, I decided to try painting an abstract image of a demon I'd visualized when I woke up in the middle of the night last night. I knew the face would be some kind of red and perhaps blue for the background. 

So I reached for the King's Blue, and for the red, one of my favorites of that tribe, Williamsburg's Italian Pompeii Red. I love all of Williamsburg's Italian colors, but this is my preferred one. I've done various paintings using it. It's really more of a reddish rust color than red, but somehow for me it makes me think of ancient paintings in caves.

I think the combination of the King's Blue and the Pompeii Red really work. I will probably add a more modern, bluish red to this. Lots more to do, but this is the first of these oil paintings I really like.