What is Oil Paint?

We buy a tube of oil paint, untwist the cap and put a small pile of it on our palettes without a second thought as to what goes into it. But it wasn't always this easy.

In Southern Europe, early man mixed animal fats with earth and stain to form the very first oil paints and applied them to grotto walls. During the 15th century, Belgian painter Jan van Eyck, mixed linseed oil and oil from nuts with diverse colors.

Later, artists would purchase the dry lumps of color, much of it in rock form, and grind it into powder before adding oil. Soon after, vendors sold the powdered pigments and oils so the artist was able to mix their own. In the late 1800s, paint became available in tubes, a convenience for artists who painted en plein air.

Today, oil paint is composed of dry oil pigments ground in a natural drying oil such as linseed. They usually include additives such as plasticizers, driers and wax to improve flexibility and make them consistent in texture and drying speed. Some brands of paint are allowed to age and then additional pigments are added to achieve consistency.

Grades of Paint

There are two grades of paint:

• Professional Artist Quality
• Student Grade

Professional or Artist Grade offers larger range of colors and have the best color strength: Have high concentration of pigment that is finely ground with the best quality oils. As a result, the colors are brighter and have more covering strength on the canvas. They are also the most expensive of the oil paint choices.

They are commonly cataloged into six series by rarity and value, Series 1 (or A) being the most plentiful and least expensive, and Series 6 (or F) being the rarest and most expensive. Professional grade paint brands include:

• Rembrandt
• Schmincke Mussini Oils
• Holbein
• Blockx
• Old Holland
• Sennelier
• Williamsburg
• Daniel Smith
• Grumbacher Pre-tested
• Michael Harding
• Utrecht
• M. Graham

Student Grade oil paint has limited colors and is made in large batches.

Student Grade oil paint tends to use more inert fillers such as chalk and less pure pigment. The result is less vivid colors, less tinting strength and less colorful effect overall. Student grade cadmium colors are sometimes called “hues.” Student grade paint brands include:

• Winton
• Grumbacher Academy
• Bob Ross
• Daler Rowney Georgian
• Windsor Newton Artist’s Oil Color (Pro/Student)
• Gamblin 1980
• Van Gogh
• Blick Studio

Drying time

The time it takes for a color to dry depends on the amount and type of oil added to the pigment and the color. Generally, earth colors dry the fastest. Cadmium colors, alizarin crimson, blacks and white dry the slowest.

Brands

Colors of the same name from different manufacturers will vary in color, cost, consistency, permanence, and drying rates.

The Secret of Good Artwork

Let’s take a moment to talk about what it takes to produce good art. Many of you began studying art at an early age, maybe you took a class in high school or college, but later quit to get a job that pays well for as we all know, it’s tough to make a living as an artist. Or, perhaps you were busy raising a family and didn’t have time to pursue it.

Like a lot of people, I waited a few years, but I always knew I’d return to painting someday. Twenty-odd years ago, I began taking courses and began to draw and paint a lot. Over the last few years, I’ve had people ask me, “How long did it take you to paint that?” And I would tell them, “About twenty years.” Of course, they would frown and say, “Okay, but right now, how long did it take?” The thing is, there’s no way to convince someone who doesn’t understand that creating a pleasing piece of artwork didn’t just happen when I first picked up a brush. I have a lot of paintings that never saw the inside of a frame, and some that shouldn’t have. It took me more than twenty years and more than three hundred paintings to learn how to paint the way that I do. And I’ll never stop learning. In another five or ten years, my style will probably change and the same picture would look completely different.

Slash by Marc R. Hanson.

During those twenty years, I studied with some of the best painters in the East, including Don Demers, Stapleton Kearns, Mark R. Hanson, Richard Schmid and Albert Handel. The reason that I chose these artists is that I admired their style of painting and I wanted to learn how they accomplished their work by watching and listening.

20010637_Big by Stapleton Kearns.

After a few workshops, I noticed that there was a pattern to their information, even though they each had their own individual style. Just about all of them said that, with some knowledge, you will mostly learn by producing a lot of work. The more you do, the better your art will be.

I may have discarded some of this class information, or replaced it with something else, but a great deal of it has stayed with me over the years, and I find myself repeating their instructions to myself as I go about creating art. I highly recommend taking workshops or classes with those artists that you admire, pay close attention to what they say, read and reread their books, and buy their videos. Watching demonstrations is a great way to understand their process, and if you can do it in person, that’s even better. It is much harder to learn on your own. And don’t expect to remember everything in the beginning. There’s a lot to think about.

The Wisdom of Ira Glass

Ira Glass is the host and executive producer of the popular National Public Radio show, This American Life. Each week, This American Life is broadcast to more than 1.7 million listeners across 500 different radio stations. But it wasn’t always this way.

Glass talks about the process of learning creative work very eloquently:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is DO A LOT OF WORK. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or month, you are going to finish one [story]. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just got to fight your way through that.”

Read more about Ira Glass...

Consider Yourself Challenged!

Okay, I've heard from a few of you, but I'd like to hear from those who have kept silent while enjoying my emails. So, what are you waiting for? If you've been drawing, painting, doodling, etching, coloring with crayons, sewing, knitting, embroidering, sculpting, making origami or any other type of creative art, send me a photo. Send your photos to pmeglio99@gmail.com and I will post them in my next challenge email.

Color and Reflected Light

COLOR, it’s everywhere and as long as we can see, we all experience it from the moment we open our eyes. They say that the human eye can detect around ten million hues. When we paint, we all strive to capture a small percentage of it, and often get frustrated in the process. We squeeze out luscious piles of color onto our palette in anticipation of capturing the beauty of a subject with it. Sometimes, we hit the colors on the mark. Other times, we get frustrated as we struggle through a painting when no matter what we do, we can’t seem to find the right mix. And, to make things worse, it’s not just local color, but also reflected color and the temperature of the light that we need to take into account when deciding on a shade. 

Color Choices

So, what is it about color and our color preferences that excite us? Color evokes strong emotional responses in all of us, but not necessarily the same types of responses. Blue may mean calmness and relaxation with visions of the ocean or a beautiful lake to one person, while denoting sadness to another. Depending on our life experiences, our preference for color can be psychological. For example, white might mean pleasantly clean and sterile to some who feel comfortable with a clean antiseptic environment, but cold and icy like a chilly winter day to others. Cultural traditions also influence our preference to color. If you look at color in clothing, for example, you may find that some of the cultures closest to the equator where weather is warmest tend to wear very strong, bright colors, while those in much colder climates tend to wear more subdued neutral colors.

Local and Relative Color

light creates the local color or colors of an object because each object possesses certain chemical properties or qualities that absorb some rays and reflect others How much an object absorbs and reflects determines the color of an object. However, we cannot go by local color alone. As artists, we need to put away our preconceptions about color and look at the relativity of color, i.e., the relationship of color to its surroundings. Changes to color happen when the light source changes, for example, when a sunny day (warm light) turns into a cloudy one (cool light), or when other colors that surround a subject change.

The Influence of Surrounding Colors

A subject’s colors are directly influenced by the color of objects that surround it. This color is possible because of reflected light. Reflected light helps to model form and gives variety to our shadows. A white building may take on the color of the bushes below and around it, because the light from the sky will bounce off of these objects and project on the surrounding objects.

The color of the Wadsworth Mansion in this painting was not pure white, though I’m pretty sure that if you asked the workers who painted the building what color they used, it would be some variation of white, such as titanium. The day that I painted it, the trees and flowering bushes around it projected a warm orange glow upward that originated from the sunlight that was in front of me, slightly to the left and somewhat high in the sky. There was very little direct light on the front of the building.

Reflections and Adjacent Objects

In the still life, the warm yellow of the lemon was reflected onto the cool bluish white surface, and the red skin of the apple and the peel of the orange reflect onto the normally white dish near the fruit as well as onto the fruit adjacent to them. 

Color Relationships

The six color squares are a good demonstration of the influence of surrounding colors. The orange color in the center is exactly the same for all six squares, yet depending on the color that surrounds the orange, the orange square appears to be a different shade. Note also that the stronger the color that surrounds the orange, the more it influences the perception of the orange hue. 

This is one example of how color values can draw attention to an object or provide a more subtle color shift. One color can become darker, lighter, warmer or cooler in relation to another color. When painting, try to relate and compare all of the colors in your composition to one another. Ask yourself, Is one color lighter or darker than the other? Is one color warmer or cooler than the other?

Next

I’m going to share my moleskin and small sketchbook sketches of people and places that I do for fun and practice. I'll talk about the types of media that I use when doing quick sketches.

Workshop Everything but White Snow

I ran a workshop for seven students at Artsplace in Cheshire last Saturday. The name of the workshop was Everything But White Snow. I had students of all ages and all levels attending. Some of them had never painted with oils. We copied one of my paintings, Snow Blanketed Field.

The  painting was of a farm field that I painted from my living room window one winter. It was early morning so the shadows were long and very distinctive. The colors in the snow were several shades of blue, pink, yellow, orange, and purple. 

Normally, I coat the canvas with a wash of color, in this case a yellow or orangey yellow. I found that the Turpenoid did not dry as quickly as mineral spirits. This caused the paint to bleed into the top paint and produce a greenish tint. I didn't realize this at first and it was too late to do anything about it. Mineral spirits do not do this. 

Just the same, the paintings turned out great. First, I had the class do a pencil drawing to show where the darks and lights are, and to get them used to drawing the shapes. Then, I walked the class through a dark to light process. I find when I teach that students do not want to do a drawing at all. Many have a hard time getting the drawing correct. Usually, this means that the painting result is disappointing. I try to emphasize that the drawing is the most important part of the process. Understanding how the eye flows through a picture, deciding and positioning the focal point, and figuring out the values is so important. Drawing it all out helps to get the vision in your head before you pick up the brush.

I love to watch as the students move from one area to another in the process. It's easy to tell those who are used to mixing colors. Gaining knowledge of color mixing takes time and a lot of practice. Studying the color wheel and doing color charts helps, though it's not as exciting as diving into the paint and attempting to match colors on the canvas. I have done the whole gamut of mixing colors for color charts using Richard Schmid's techniques described in his first Alla Prima book.  I confess that I don't pull out the charts as often as I should, but every now and then I do look at them. I highly recommend doing the color charts.

 

The students nearly finished their paintings, and seemed rather pleased with the results. I think some of them will continue to work with oil paint. I had fun teaching the class. They were all very excited to see what they could do. I was pleased to see how well they did.