01-04-2020, 03:34 AM
Artloader -
I haven't used a lot of acrylics, I'm not a fan of the fast drying time, so I don't have any good comments on it.
Maybe you were using zink white. It's a pigment not used much anymore in oil painting as it gets very brittle, although it's probably fine in acrylics as it will remain somewhat flexible. If I could, I'd honestly use it but my paintings wouldn't be materially sound. You can get very pretty and sensitive light passages with it. You have to be careful with titanium as it has a tendency to pollute other paints. This maybe isn't a big problem in acrylics because it dries so fast, but in oil you can really screw up your transparent dark mixtures if it gets in there.
I'm very fond of stiff brushes and paint with a lot of body. A lot of paintings done historically were done this way, especially in the lights, although darks were usually painted with more soft paints. I think the look of it is very nice and it gives you a lot of good control when you're more familiar with it. Fluid paint can easily look like those canvas prints rather than a real painting if you blend too much or detail things too fluidly.
Hope the thread is somewhat helpful if you're looking into oils.
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(I think taking pics helps break up the post, making it easier to read so I'll try to include some to make it more appealing)
Studio Stuff
So the easel. Having a good easel is nice but you can make do with very little. When Repin painted Modest Mussorgsky in the hospital, he had to balance the canvas on a chair while painting. I've often gotten away with balancing the canvas on my knee for smaller sketches but if you're doing something large, you'd ideally want to prop it up against something so you can compare the painting and the subject from a distance.
I would recommend an easel that stands vertically for studio work, giving a lot more stability than many tripod easels. Tripod easels are good for landscape paintings as they're very easy to carry but they are less stable and can tip over or twist on larger paintings.
(you can see me blocking in the big proportions of my painting with charcoal)
If you're working in a studio space, a painting table is vey very nice. What a painting table is, is essentially a table that holds your palette so you don't have to. It lets you work without having a heavy weight on your arm. In school we had these trays from Ikea that are perfect as they can also hold your paints and brushes in the trays. Something a lot of us did was to tape Pringles cans to the side and they are just tall enough to comfortably hold long-handle brushes. After I left I bought one for myself and it's very nice. (I did some cleaning so it's empty right now)
The palette I generally use is a glass palette. This one is very old and I should probably replace it, but it's fine. I recently flipped it and now there are no scratches on the surface. You can make your own out of picture frames, removing the picture and frame and just using the glass and backboard.
Cleaning any palette is very simple but it should be done thoroughly. First you just have to scrape off any paint with your palette knife. Once that's done, you can wipe of as much as you can with a paper towel. Then pour a very little solvent on the palette, turpentine or mineral spirits, then wipe it around with a paper towel, saturating any remaining paint so it becomes very easy to clean off. Once you wipe the surface and no paint is on the cloth, it's fully cleaned. If you don't fully clean it, small amounts of paint will build up and cause an uneven surface, making future cleaning harder as the palette knife will have a harder time pulling off the paint.
Palette knives are very useful. Many people are tempted when starting out to only brush mix because using a palette knife can be tedious, but working from mixtures promotes cleaner colors. I like thin palette knives as it makes it easier to mix up small amount of half-tones. The tiny palette knives that are very short don't work well for mixing as paint gets stuck on top and they aren't flexible enough to easily get it off.
Mirrors are good to have. It's a very common way to get a fresh look at a drawing or painting and very useful to avoid skewed work and avoid missing things you naturally gloss over. I have a normal mirror but also a black mirror. The black mirror technically welding glass but it's not really see through. I use it to look at the subject mirrored in it, and it shows me everything but keyed down a lot in value. It shows the hierarchy of light in a very useful way.
When you have painted for a day and you realise that it doesn't quite work and there's a fair bit of paint on the canvas, you may want to scrape it off. You can use your palette knife to do this but there's a problem. Using the palette knife flattens out the texture of the canvas, pushing paint into the pores and scraping off just the top surface, leaving a flat surface.
To get around this, Solomon J. Solomon recommended what he called a steel plush mat. What this means has changed over the years and today the closest thing similar to it are these steel scrubbers used for cleaning metal pots and pans. These will dig into the pores of the canvas and pick up that paint, so your canvas preserves its texture. You can use a paper towel but then you smear the paint so much it's hard to see the general impression of what you previously painted.
Wasting paint is never fun but using half-dried paint also sucks. There is however a way to preserve paints very well that wasn't available to most painters throughout history. If you have a glass palette or you take the piles of paint and fold it into some baking paper, you can put it into the freezer and it stays basically the same. The drying process of oil paints is sensitive to temperature and paintings in very warm days dry very fast whereas if they're left in the cold, it takes a much longer time. Some artists used to place their paintings next to a fireplace when they wanted them to dry enough to paint on the next day. We on the other hand can use temperature to delay the drying of our paints so we don't have to throw any extra we have after a day's use.
Now don't save muddy mixtures, when working don't pick up more paint with a dirty brush or palette knife. Try to work very clean and you can save your paints for a few days.
Basic Brush Care
Cleaning brushes is something a lot of people mention but it's very important. Poorly maintained brushes make painting much harder, paint naturally rise into the ferrule of the brush and once dry, the hairs stick together near the base. This functionally shortens the length of the hairs and looses the sensitivity of the brush. Poorly maintained brushes can also cause the hairs to splay which is difficult to correct.
When you clean your brush, you can begin the process by wiping off as much as possible with a paper towel. Then dipping it in a bit of solvent so the remaining paint becomes softer and easier to remove with a paper towel. Finally you want to wash the brush with water and soap. The type of soap makes a difference and in general you want something mild, unperformed and simple. There is soap made from linseed oil that works well but I prefer something called "grön såpa" here in Sweden which is a very common and simple soap made from pine trees. I think it's a norther European thing so maybe it isn't available everywhere.
The way you'd wash your brush can vary but in general avoid having it directly under the stream of the water and don't push against the hairs. Constantly pull away from the hairs almost as if you were making a brush stroke. This prevents the hairs from bending and getting splayed. The easiest way to clean them that I have found is to get soapy water inside of them and then move the brush in a circle on my palm, making the hairs massage each other, getting the soap deep into the brush to remove any paint. Using this method you can be more firm as you're always pressing with the length of the brush so it doesn't harm it. You do this until the soap foam remains white and you're confident there's no paint left. If you've used a black with a strong tinting strength, it is possible that a brush may be slightly stained in parts but it doesn't harm the brush and if it can't be removed, it's not a big deal.
You want to wash your brush immediately after use. When you're out doing landscapes, bring some plastic wrap and wrap it around the tip of the brush bundle. It is possible to removed dry paint from brushes but every process harms the brush to some degree. Bristle brushes swell in water and this swelling can cause it to splay when attempting these methods.
You can store the brush in oil as to not have to clean it and while it works, I did that when I was a student, it's not something I'd recommend now. Oil penetrates the hairs and will change the feel, making them a little less spring. Some like this, others like myself don't. It causes you to introduce more oil to your painting, even when you try to wipe them off well before painting. The oil you often use for this is poor quality oil and if that gets into the painting, it can darken more than the type of oil you use in your mediums. When traveling, you have to take extra precautions with your brushes as over an hour, some more oil will seep out of them and if you've left them somewhere you may stain something with oil. It is also difficult to reverse the process. I've done it with my old brushes, but even after cleaning them very very thoroughly, some of them dried sticky and I had to go through a lot to remove that dried oil.
Now there's a secret to very nice brushes. This is a secret that is widespread among artists but not really spoken aloud all that much. The reason is because this thing is really weird but works stupidly well. When you've cleaned your brushes and they're wet, the hairs naturally splay a bit and if left to dry, their shape stays a little splayed. Now the way you get around it is by using something to coat the brush hairs, that let you shape them while they're wet and dries hard without introducing materials hazardous to paint. The thing you use is spit. Saliva has the right properties to allow the brush to be shaped into its original state and when it dries, the hairs are a little hard, holding the hairs in place firmly. It is brittle when dry and once you start to bend the hairs, the dried spit breaks and the brush is nice and springy again. It's weird and gross, but it works super well to preserve your brushes. When I was a student, at the end of the day you could see people in the corner of rooms spitting in their palms to coat their brushes. It was endorsed by the instructors but it never stopped being weird doing it around other people. I've heard milk also being used but nobody I know has actually tried it. Oh and don't suck on your brush if you've been using lead white. There are accounts of artists throughout history doing this, assuming their brush was totally clean and getting lead into their system.
That's enough for now. Have stuff to do tomorrow but will probably jump in with the underpainting the next day.
I haven't used a lot of acrylics, I'm not a fan of the fast drying time, so I don't have any good comments on it.
Maybe you were using zink white. It's a pigment not used much anymore in oil painting as it gets very brittle, although it's probably fine in acrylics as it will remain somewhat flexible. If I could, I'd honestly use it but my paintings wouldn't be materially sound. You can get very pretty and sensitive light passages with it. You have to be careful with titanium as it has a tendency to pollute other paints. This maybe isn't a big problem in acrylics because it dries so fast, but in oil you can really screw up your transparent dark mixtures if it gets in there.
I'm very fond of stiff brushes and paint with a lot of body. A lot of paintings done historically were done this way, especially in the lights, although darks were usually painted with more soft paints. I think the look of it is very nice and it gives you a lot of good control when you're more familiar with it. Fluid paint can easily look like those canvas prints rather than a real painting if you blend too much or detail things too fluidly.
Hope the thread is somewhat helpful if you're looking into oils.
---------------------
(I think taking pics helps break up the post, making it easier to read so I'll try to include some to make it more appealing)
Studio Stuff
So the easel. Having a good easel is nice but you can make do with very little. When Repin painted Modest Mussorgsky in the hospital, he had to balance the canvas on a chair while painting. I've often gotten away with balancing the canvas on my knee for smaller sketches but if you're doing something large, you'd ideally want to prop it up against something so you can compare the painting and the subject from a distance.
I would recommend an easel that stands vertically for studio work, giving a lot more stability than many tripod easels. Tripod easels are good for landscape paintings as they're very easy to carry but they are less stable and can tip over or twist on larger paintings.
(you can see me blocking in the big proportions of my painting with charcoal)
If you're working in a studio space, a painting table is vey very nice. What a painting table is, is essentially a table that holds your palette so you don't have to. It lets you work without having a heavy weight on your arm. In school we had these trays from Ikea that are perfect as they can also hold your paints and brushes in the trays. Something a lot of us did was to tape Pringles cans to the side and they are just tall enough to comfortably hold long-handle brushes. After I left I bought one for myself and it's very nice. (I did some cleaning so it's empty right now)
The palette I generally use is a glass palette. This one is very old and I should probably replace it, but it's fine. I recently flipped it and now there are no scratches on the surface. You can make your own out of picture frames, removing the picture and frame and just using the glass and backboard.
Cleaning any palette is very simple but it should be done thoroughly. First you just have to scrape off any paint with your palette knife. Once that's done, you can wipe of as much as you can with a paper towel. Then pour a very little solvent on the palette, turpentine or mineral spirits, then wipe it around with a paper towel, saturating any remaining paint so it becomes very easy to clean off. Once you wipe the surface and no paint is on the cloth, it's fully cleaned. If you don't fully clean it, small amounts of paint will build up and cause an uneven surface, making future cleaning harder as the palette knife will have a harder time pulling off the paint.
Palette knives are very useful. Many people are tempted when starting out to only brush mix because using a palette knife can be tedious, but working from mixtures promotes cleaner colors. I like thin palette knives as it makes it easier to mix up small amount of half-tones. The tiny palette knives that are very short don't work well for mixing as paint gets stuck on top and they aren't flexible enough to easily get it off.
Mirrors are good to have. It's a very common way to get a fresh look at a drawing or painting and very useful to avoid skewed work and avoid missing things you naturally gloss over. I have a normal mirror but also a black mirror. The black mirror technically welding glass but it's not really see through. I use it to look at the subject mirrored in it, and it shows me everything but keyed down a lot in value. It shows the hierarchy of light in a very useful way.
When you have painted for a day and you realise that it doesn't quite work and there's a fair bit of paint on the canvas, you may want to scrape it off. You can use your palette knife to do this but there's a problem. Using the palette knife flattens out the texture of the canvas, pushing paint into the pores and scraping off just the top surface, leaving a flat surface.
To get around this, Solomon J. Solomon recommended what he called a steel plush mat. What this means has changed over the years and today the closest thing similar to it are these steel scrubbers used for cleaning metal pots and pans. These will dig into the pores of the canvas and pick up that paint, so your canvas preserves its texture. You can use a paper towel but then you smear the paint so much it's hard to see the general impression of what you previously painted.
Wasting paint is never fun but using half-dried paint also sucks. There is however a way to preserve paints very well that wasn't available to most painters throughout history. If you have a glass palette or you take the piles of paint and fold it into some baking paper, you can put it into the freezer and it stays basically the same. The drying process of oil paints is sensitive to temperature and paintings in very warm days dry very fast whereas if they're left in the cold, it takes a much longer time. Some artists used to place their paintings next to a fireplace when they wanted them to dry enough to paint on the next day. We on the other hand can use temperature to delay the drying of our paints so we don't have to throw any extra we have after a day's use.
Now don't save muddy mixtures, when working don't pick up more paint with a dirty brush or palette knife. Try to work very clean and you can save your paints for a few days.
Basic Brush Care
Cleaning brushes is something a lot of people mention but it's very important. Poorly maintained brushes make painting much harder, paint naturally rise into the ferrule of the brush and once dry, the hairs stick together near the base. This functionally shortens the length of the hairs and looses the sensitivity of the brush. Poorly maintained brushes can also cause the hairs to splay which is difficult to correct.
When you clean your brush, you can begin the process by wiping off as much as possible with a paper towel. Then dipping it in a bit of solvent so the remaining paint becomes softer and easier to remove with a paper towel. Finally you want to wash the brush with water and soap. The type of soap makes a difference and in general you want something mild, unperformed and simple. There is soap made from linseed oil that works well but I prefer something called "grön såpa" here in Sweden which is a very common and simple soap made from pine trees. I think it's a norther European thing so maybe it isn't available everywhere.
The way you'd wash your brush can vary but in general avoid having it directly under the stream of the water and don't push against the hairs. Constantly pull away from the hairs almost as if you were making a brush stroke. This prevents the hairs from bending and getting splayed. The easiest way to clean them that I have found is to get soapy water inside of them and then move the brush in a circle on my palm, making the hairs massage each other, getting the soap deep into the brush to remove any paint. Using this method you can be more firm as you're always pressing with the length of the brush so it doesn't harm it. You do this until the soap foam remains white and you're confident there's no paint left. If you've used a black with a strong tinting strength, it is possible that a brush may be slightly stained in parts but it doesn't harm the brush and if it can't be removed, it's not a big deal.
You want to wash your brush immediately after use. When you're out doing landscapes, bring some plastic wrap and wrap it around the tip of the brush bundle. It is possible to removed dry paint from brushes but every process harms the brush to some degree. Bristle brushes swell in water and this swelling can cause it to splay when attempting these methods.
You can store the brush in oil as to not have to clean it and while it works, I did that when I was a student, it's not something I'd recommend now. Oil penetrates the hairs and will change the feel, making them a little less spring. Some like this, others like myself don't. It causes you to introduce more oil to your painting, even when you try to wipe them off well before painting. The oil you often use for this is poor quality oil and if that gets into the painting, it can darken more than the type of oil you use in your mediums. When traveling, you have to take extra precautions with your brushes as over an hour, some more oil will seep out of them and if you've left them somewhere you may stain something with oil. It is also difficult to reverse the process. I've done it with my old brushes, but even after cleaning them very very thoroughly, some of them dried sticky and I had to go through a lot to remove that dried oil.
Now there's a secret to very nice brushes. This is a secret that is widespread among artists but not really spoken aloud all that much. The reason is because this thing is really weird but works stupidly well. When you've cleaned your brushes and they're wet, the hairs naturally splay a bit and if left to dry, their shape stays a little splayed. Now the way you get around it is by using something to coat the brush hairs, that let you shape them while they're wet and dries hard without introducing materials hazardous to paint. The thing you use is spit. Saliva has the right properties to allow the brush to be shaped into its original state and when it dries, the hairs are a little hard, holding the hairs in place firmly. It is brittle when dry and once you start to bend the hairs, the dried spit breaks and the brush is nice and springy again. It's weird and gross, but it works super well to preserve your brushes. When I was a student, at the end of the day you could see people in the corner of rooms spitting in their palms to coat their brushes. It was endorsed by the instructors but it never stopped being weird doing it around other people. I've heard milk also being used but nobody I know has actually tried it. Oh and don't suck on your brush if you've been using lead white. There are accounts of artists throughout history doing this, assuming their brush was totally clean and getting lead into their system.
That's enough for now. Have stuff to do tomorrow but will probably jump in with the underpainting the next day.
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