01-02-2020, 05:58 AM
Color
The selection of pigments is in some ways important. They often influence the mood of your work. A palette utilising cad red, cad yellow and ultramarine blue while very broad in range, often lacks a lot of nuance and character that you’d get form a more earthy palette. Every pigment has its own character and some pigments tend to be more useful for painting than others. Pigments also differ in their permanence as some are more likely to fade, darken or crack over time.
In general, I prefer resting more weight on color mixing rather than having perfect pigments available. I like lower chroma painting and I like trying to do more with less, rather than trying to always chase the most chromatic color possible. Many artists throughout history have advised to use as few colors as possible, particularly earth colors and it's something I try to follow and encourage in others. With fewer colors, paintings tend to be more harmonious and if mixed carefully, still colorful. Earth colors are also to be preferred as they are all very permanent and have a sense of dignity to them that more chromatic colors rarely have.
In Solomon's book he writes “It is wiser in every respect to restrain your selection than to attempt extraordinary effects which are not likely to last, and which may tempt you to overstep the proper limitations of your medium”.
Speed writes in his book on painting "Always do as much as you can with the earth colors, particularly in the early stages of a picture" and "The more brilliant colors have a fascination for the younger student. Prone to messy handling and dirty brushes, they rush to the brighter pigments in the hope of getting themselves out of a mess; whereas with cleaner handling what is wanted could better be got by simple earth colors, the use of which give on an excellent training in clean handling."
There are a lot of new ideas about how someone should construct a proper palette but modern theory doesn’t always translate well intro practice while good practice is good regardless of someone’s theory. It’s generally best not to worry too much about these very technical systems people come up with.
If your particular palette can’t match a color 1:1, you can shift all other colors in a direction to make room for the color you have less range in. Can’t get a strong blue out of your palette? Make everything warmer and the blue will feel more chromatic. If you don’t have room for a high chroma color, you can also lower the chroma or other things and make it feel higher in chroma in a relative sense. When colors are approached relatively, even very limited palettes become very functional and a lot of room for creative color expression opens up without having to deviate from the appearance of nature. A popular example is Zorn, finding ways to work with very limited colors.
I tend to use a similar palette for most things but I do enjoy experimenting. What I use is not all that fancy, it's very limited but it works well for all kinds of painting and it harmonises very well.
My general palette is:
Titanium white
Yellow ochre (sometimes called gold ochre, the darker version).
English/Venetian red, (Cad red when needed)
Transparent red oxide
Ultramarine blue
Mars black
Overall it's a very simple and limited earth palette with two transparent colors for deeper shadows and a little bit more range in the blue-green zone.
I use titanium white because it’s practical. Lead is better for many reasons but if you work carefully with your color mixtures, it isn’t as huge of a problem as a lot of people make it out to be. I suspect a lot of people dislike titanium white because they brush mix a lot and in those cases I can entirely understand disliking its tinting strength. When mixing colors with a palette knife and you don’t brush around so much, it’s very manageable. It is less stable than lead and takes longer to dry which is an issue but it’s still a decent color.
Yellow ochre is a great earth color, very stable with a very nice body. It can be used in large quantities in any mixture just fine. It’s great and I rarely see a reason not to have it on the palette unless I’m doing a grisaille.
English and Venetian red are earth pigments and very stable. They have a strong tinting strength so very little is needed in a painting. I can’t tell the difference between the two, I suspect it’s just a slight tint difference and not much more. You just need one of them. They're a little cool and dark, so if you want a very bright red, cadmium can be a better choice.
Transparent red oxide is what it sounds like. It’s a dark transparent red that can often be very practical for darker tones or when you want to gently warm a color mixture.
Ultramarine is to expand my range in the blue and green zone, helping a bit with landscapes and some of my still life paintings. It has a strong tinting strength so very little is needed when cooling down some mixtures. The other benefit of it is that when mixed with transparent red oxide, it forms a very transparent black that can be used for glazing or as I use it, as a way to make my dark tones more transparent. I often mix it with a little mars black just so it forms a more medium transparent paint to help with deeper shadows.
I use mars black instead of the more common ivory black for two reasons. The primary has to do with the paint film. Mars black, like many other iron oxides, forms a strong paint film whereas ivory forms a weaker, more brittle layer. Cracking in dark passages is often the worst because if it shows the ground underneath it will appear light and if the edges of the crack turn slightly, it will catch light, drawing in attention. So avoiding cracking in dark passages is very important to me so Mars is preferable. The other reason to use mars is drying time. Mars requires much less oil and also dries faster. When working on a painting day after day, faster drying time is good, especially for dark passages as painting over half-dried paint tends to sink in much more. Mars black does have an aggressive tinting strength but cutting it with an ultramarine and transparent red makes it much more mild and manageable.
It is trendy to exclude black from painting but it’s not really something I do. While black isn’t a “color”, the negation of light exist in reality so there is no reason to exclude black if we care about the impression of reality. The impressionists were mostly just being edgy by excluding it completely. It can be wise to think about the transparency and chroma of your black and this is where the ultramarine and transparent red comes into play. Some people think the the chromatic transparent black doesn’t count as black but functionally it's black.
If you find your paint to be very soft or a bit too oily, you can mix in a little bit of powdered chalk and it will give it more body. It won’t cause any change in color as the tinting strength of chalk is almost non existent. You can even mix it with black workout any issues. You can also make a putty out of chalk and linseed oil and use it as a medium or a paste to change the feel of the paint. Chalk is inert so it won't react to any pigment or oil, so there are no worries about poor ageing. I've seen the good condition of Rembrandt paintings attributed in part to the use of chalk in the paint but I haven't done much research on that particular example. Velazquez is another example of an artist using chalk when painting.
The brand of the oil paint can at times be a big deal. Some brands try to sneak in other pigments into their tubes, like I found some Rembrandt blacks had blue pigments, I think ultramarine, in them. I had some Lefranc ochre colors and they were completely different from other ochre colors. I found out when looking at the pigment number that it was a different pigment, I think a synthetically manufactured version of the color, even when calling it the same as other brands. Companies do this to try and impress people with having pigments that seem deeper or higher in chroma than other brands.
Generally, pigment quality has improved greatly since the 17-1800’s, and the need for the best most perfect quality pigment is less important now as most things are adequate. There are however different individual qualities, like for example the amount of filler and handling-altering materials included. Everyone says they try to make it as pigment dense as possible but many actually add other things. Old holland is a good example for comparison because as far as I know, they have very pure paints but the way they feel is often very different from something like a winsor newton paint that has more fillers in it.
You can also have pigments that have gone through different levels of grinding. Old holland’s yellow ochre is very coarse, you can hear it make sand-like noise when you mix it with your palette knife. Becker’s yellow ochre (they call it gold ochre) is very smooth and has gone through more grinding. The amount of grinding changes what the paint feels like, sometimes even alters how stable the paint film is.
Overall tubed paint tends to be on the softer side and something I recommend is to let the paint sit on some cardboard for a few minutes before using them. Some paint tubes are overflowing with oil and literally drip from the tube. With these it is very important to remove the excess oil. You want a nice creamy paste to work with, at least as a default.
Mediums
I won’t use a lot of medium when painting. The most sound way of painting from a material and archival perspective is with paint about the consistency it comes in the tube (depends on manufacturer it can vary, often a little less oily than most commercial tubed paints is the best). I use some solvent when painting but the amount is very little, only enough to make the paint a little more willing to move, but much less than many modern techniques.
The reason I only use solvent as a medium is because of a few reasons. I want to limit the amount of oil that is in my painting as it contributes to yellowing and darkening. It will also evaporate as I work, allowing me to more easily paint over earlier layers. Oil remains wet and makes it difficult to work over thinly painted areas without causing a mess, so solvent is often preferable. I generally use mineral spirits as it evaporates a little slower than turpentine and is less hazardous to breathe. Historically turpentine was favoured but great artists like Repin used everything from mineral spirits to kerosine, they all function very similarly when painting.
I have to be cautious to not use too much solvent as a paint film that has been too diluted can become weak and cause colors to be fugitive when varnishing (meaning that they leave the oil film and can stain the other colors). Some modern artists are on the border of solvent abuse and I suspect some of their paintings will be more fragile and difficult to clean in a hundred years. A simple rule to follow is that if the paint still feels like a paste and not a liquid, it probably has enough oil in it to form a strong and healthy paint film. Thinned down paint also looses a lot of character and can make a painting come across as a mass produced copy of a painting. If you want to move the paint around with brushy marks, sometimes it’s better to select a very stiff brush and physically push it around rather than diluting the paint with medium.
Some people may be familiar with the term “fat over lean”. This is a kind of “rule” that has been developed for painting that is often treated as a must for all artists but the reality of the situation is that it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The reason the rule came about is because paint thinned down with turpentine can become so lean that it doesn’t have enough oil to hold on to all the pigments and when re-varnishing the painting some pigments can come loose and be a big problem (fugitive colors as I mentioned before). The reason you don’t only paint in fat layers is that fat paint layers don’t adhere to each other well and the more oil there is, the more the painting is susceptible to darkening, yellowing and wrinkling.
There's a state between these two points often referred to as the "critical pigment volume concentration" or cPVC. This is where the paint has just enough oil to saturate all the pigment but no more as to cause issues with darkening or adhesion. This is close to the consistency paint comes in the tube, but can vary as some paints are much softer than others.
There’s a good article on the natural pigments blog about this https://www.naturalpigments.com/artist-m...over-lean/
I think that's enough about color for now. I'm writing a forum post, not a book, so it's probably best that I limit myself. I can go more in-depth on particular palettes of certain painters or movements throughout history, as well as more in-depth about other mediums to use when painting, but that's if people are interested in it.
The selection of pigments is in some ways important. They often influence the mood of your work. A palette utilising cad red, cad yellow and ultramarine blue while very broad in range, often lacks a lot of nuance and character that you’d get form a more earthy palette. Every pigment has its own character and some pigments tend to be more useful for painting than others. Pigments also differ in their permanence as some are more likely to fade, darken or crack over time.
In general, I prefer resting more weight on color mixing rather than having perfect pigments available. I like lower chroma painting and I like trying to do more with less, rather than trying to always chase the most chromatic color possible. Many artists throughout history have advised to use as few colors as possible, particularly earth colors and it's something I try to follow and encourage in others. With fewer colors, paintings tend to be more harmonious and if mixed carefully, still colorful. Earth colors are also to be preferred as they are all very permanent and have a sense of dignity to them that more chromatic colors rarely have.
In Solomon's book he writes “It is wiser in every respect to restrain your selection than to attempt extraordinary effects which are not likely to last, and which may tempt you to overstep the proper limitations of your medium”.
Speed writes in his book on painting "Always do as much as you can with the earth colors, particularly in the early stages of a picture" and "The more brilliant colors have a fascination for the younger student. Prone to messy handling and dirty brushes, they rush to the brighter pigments in the hope of getting themselves out of a mess; whereas with cleaner handling what is wanted could better be got by simple earth colors, the use of which give on an excellent training in clean handling."
There are a lot of new ideas about how someone should construct a proper palette but modern theory doesn’t always translate well intro practice while good practice is good regardless of someone’s theory. It’s generally best not to worry too much about these very technical systems people come up with.
If your particular palette can’t match a color 1:1, you can shift all other colors in a direction to make room for the color you have less range in. Can’t get a strong blue out of your palette? Make everything warmer and the blue will feel more chromatic. If you don’t have room for a high chroma color, you can also lower the chroma or other things and make it feel higher in chroma in a relative sense. When colors are approached relatively, even very limited palettes become very functional and a lot of room for creative color expression opens up without having to deviate from the appearance of nature. A popular example is Zorn, finding ways to work with very limited colors.
I tend to use a similar palette for most things but I do enjoy experimenting. What I use is not all that fancy, it's very limited but it works well for all kinds of painting and it harmonises very well.
My general palette is:
Titanium white
Yellow ochre (sometimes called gold ochre, the darker version).
English/Venetian red, (Cad red when needed)
Transparent red oxide
Ultramarine blue
Mars black
Overall it's a very simple and limited earth palette with two transparent colors for deeper shadows and a little bit more range in the blue-green zone.
I use titanium white because it’s practical. Lead is better for many reasons but if you work carefully with your color mixtures, it isn’t as huge of a problem as a lot of people make it out to be. I suspect a lot of people dislike titanium white because they brush mix a lot and in those cases I can entirely understand disliking its tinting strength. When mixing colors with a palette knife and you don’t brush around so much, it’s very manageable. It is less stable than lead and takes longer to dry which is an issue but it’s still a decent color.
Yellow ochre is a great earth color, very stable with a very nice body. It can be used in large quantities in any mixture just fine. It’s great and I rarely see a reason not to have it on the palette unless I’m doing a grisaille.
English and Venetian red are earth pigments and very stable. They have a strong tinting strength so very little is needed in a painting. I can’t tell the difference between the two, I suspect it’s just a slight tint difference and not much more. You just need one of them. They're a little cool and dark, so if you want a very bright red, cadmium can be a better choice.
Transparent red oxide is what it sounds like. It’s a dark transparent red that can often be very practical for darker tones or when you want to gently warm a color mixture.
Ultramarine is to expand my range in the blue and green zone, helping a bit with landscapes and some of my still life paintings. It has a strong tinting strength so very little is needed when cooling down some mixtures. The other benefit of it is that when mixed with transparent red oxide, it forms a very transparent black that can be used for glazing or as I use it, as a way to make my dark tones more transparent. I often mix it with a little mars black just so it forms a more medium transparent paint to help with deeper shadows.
I use mars black instead of the more common ivory black for two reasons. The primary has to do with the paint film. Mars black, like many other iron oxides, forms a strong paint film whereas ivory forms a weaker, more brittle layer. Cracking in dark passages is often the worst because if it shows the ground underneath it will appear light and if the edges of the crack turn slightly, it will catch light, drawing in attention. So avoiding cracking in dark passages is very important to me so Mars is preferable. The other reason to use mars is drying time. Mars requires much less oil and also dries faster. When working on a painting day after day, faster drying time is good, especially for dark passages as painting over half-dried paint tends to sink in much more. Mars black does have an aggressive tinting strength but cutting it with an ultramarine and transparent red makes it much more mild and manageable.
It is trendy to exclude black from painting but it’s not really something I do. While black isn’t a “color”, the negation of light exist in reality so there is no reason to exclude black if we care about the impression of reality. The impressionists were mostly just being edgy by excluding it completely. It can be wise to think about the transparency and chroma of your black and this is where the ultramarine and transparent red comes into play. Some people think the the chromatic transparent black doesn’t count as black but functionally it's black.
If you find your paint to be very soft or a bit too oily, you can mix in a little bit of powdered chalk and it will give it more body. It won’t cause any change in color as the tinting strength of chalk is almost non existent. You can even mix it with black workout any issues. You can also make a putty out of chalk and linseed oil and use it as a medium or a paste to change the feel of the paint. Chalk is inert so it won't react to any pigment or oil, so there are no worries about poor ageing. I've seen the good condition of Rembrandt paintings attributed in part to the use of chalk in the paint but I haven't done much research on that particular example. Velazquez is another example of an artist using chalk when painting.
The brand of the oil paint can at times be a big deal. Some brands try to sneak in other pigments into their tubes, like I found some Rembrandt blacks had blue pigments, I think ultramarine, in them. I had some Lefranc ochre colors and they were completely different from other ochre colors. I found out when looking at the pigment number that it was a different pigment, I think a synthetically manufactured version of the color, even when calling it the same as other brands. Companies do this to try and impress people with having pigments that seem deeper or higher in chroma than other brands.
Generally, pigment quality has improved greatly since the 17-1800’s, and the need for the best most perfect quality pigment is less important now as most things are adequate. There are however different individual qualities, like for example the amount of filler and handling-altering materials included. Everyone says they try to make it as pigment dense as possible but many actually add other things. Old holland is a good example for comparison because as far as I know, they have very pure paints but the way they feel is often very different from something like a winsor newton paint that has more fillers in it.
You can also have pigments that have gone through different levels of grinding. Old holland’s yellow ochre is very coarse, you can hear it make sand-like noise when you mix it with your palette knife. Becker’s yellow ochre (they call it gold ochre) is very smooth and has gone through more grinding. The amount of grinding changes what the paint feels like, sometimes even alters how stable the paint film is.
Overall tubed paint tends to be on the softer side and something I recommend is to let the paint sit on some cardboard for a few minutes before using them. Some paint tubes are overflowing with oil and literally drip from the tube. With these it is very important to remove the excess oil. You want a nice creamy paste to work with, at least as a default.
Mediums
I won’t use a lot of medium when painting. The most sound way of painting from a material and archival perspective is with paint about the consistency it comes in the tube (depends on manufacturer it can vary, often a little less oily than most commercial tubed paints is the best). I use some solvent when painting but the amount is very little, only enough to make the paint a little more willing to move, but much less than many modern techniques.
The reason I only use solvent as a medium is because of a few reasons. I want to limit the amount of oil that is in my painting as it contributes to yellowing and darkening. It will also evaporate as I work, allowing me to more easily paint over earlier layers. Oil remains wet and makes it difficult to work over thinly painted areas without causing a mess, so solvent is often preferable. I generally use mineral spirits as it evaporates a little slower than turpentine and is less hazardous to breathe. Historically turpentine was favoured but great artists like Repin used everything from mineral spirits to kerosine, they all function very similarly when painting.
I have to be cautious to not use too much solvent as a paint film that has been too diluted can become weak and cause colors to be fugitive when varnishing (meaning that they leave the oil film and can stain the other colors). Some modern artists are on the border of solvent abuse and I suspect some of their paintings will be more fragile and difficult to clean in a hundred years. A simple rule to follow is that if the paint still feels like a paste and not a liquid, it probably has enough oil in it to form a strong and healthy paint film. Thinned down paint also looses a lot of character and can make a painting come across as a mass produced copy of a painting. If you want to move the paint around with brushy marks, sometimes it’s better to select a very stiff brush and physically push it around rather than diluting the paint with medium.
Some people may be familiar with the term “fat over lean”. This is a kind of “rule” that has been developed for painting that is often treated as a must for all artists but the reality of the situation is that it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The reason the rule came about is because paint thinned down with turpentine can become so lean that it doesn’t have enough oil to hold on to all the pigments and when re-varnishing the painting some pigments can come loose and be a big problem (fugitive colors as I mentioned before). The reason you don’t only paint in fat layers is that fat paint layers don’t adhere to each other well and the more oil there is, the more the painting is susceptible to darkening, yellowing and wrinkling.
There's a state between these two points often referred to as the "critical pigment volume concentration" or cPVC. This is where the paint has just enough oil to saturate all the pigment but no more as to cause issues with darkening or adhesion. This is close to the consistency paint comes in the tube, but can vary as some paints are much softer than others.
There’s a good article on the natural pigments blog about this https://www.naturalpigments.com/artist-m...over-lean/
I think that's enough about color for now. I'm writing a forum post, not a book, so it's probably best that I limit myself. I can go more in-depth on particular palettes of certain painters or movements throughout history, as well as more in-depth about other mediums to use when painting, but that's if people are interested in it.
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