The Sun and Oil Painting April 18, 2022 16:16

Many times I've read that exposing oil paintings to sunlight (in limited amounts) helps to brighten colors as well as helping them dry faster. The windows in my place point east and north, so I don't get a lot of direct sunlight, but it does slant in in the morning. I finished a recently sold painting with sun-thickened poppy oil (<--). Last time I did this, it took more than a week for the thin coating of poppy oil to dry. This time I decided to try using the sun. I exposed the painting to direct sunlight, propping it in an open window during the morning when direct sun shone on it. This has made the poppy oil coating almost dry in only two days. One more day should do it. Pretty cool!

Now that I've tried this, I'm going to use it to encourage faster drying in future paintings. I usually use walnut oil as a medium (if anything), but I would like to use poppy oil and to adopt more poppy-oil based paints, like Blockx. Outside of wishing to have as little yellowing as possible of my paintings, I have spiritual associations with the poppy. Still, even though I made sun-thickened poppy seed oil several years ago, I have not used it as a medium due to fears about its slow drying. In fact, instead I've used a historical lead/manganese drier in the form of siccatif de Courtrai, applying one tiny drop in each blob of paint on my palette. This really helps make the paint dry faster, but since I've been painting on stretched canvas instead of on panels or boards, I'm taking a risk with respect to possible cracking down the road. It would be great if I could get similar results simply from exposing paint to sunlight. Won't work in winter, but it should for the rest of the year. So I'll give it a try and will report back. 

I know I haven't been posting much, but I have been hellishly busy with the nft project I created (which will begin to be auctioned this week), with final edits on The Magic of the Sword of Moses, and with the proposal for my third book, which I am presently researching and writing. Yow!