Conversations with Artists

Conversations with Artists

I have been having an Open Studio as part of the C-Art Festival. 

The first weekend stood out for me because my visitors were fellow artists who were interested in the water-mixable oil paint that I am currently using. 

This is what I told them. 

I started by buying Duo Aqua paints. I bought a lot of colours and I like the way they mix with water easily and blend on the canvas. They dry quite quickly, not as quickly as acrylics of course, so they need to be kept wet. They dry matte. 

However the colours, particularly the earth colours: the umbers, ochres and siennas, weren't the precise colours that I expected. 

When I took up portrait painting seriously I used pastels and the brand I used basically was Talens Rembrandt. I used the earth colour in the range of tints for different skin colours. So I expected that if I mixed, for example, burnt sienna with white that I would end up with a colour that would work well for a man who spent time in the outdoors. 

Another colour that I used a lot of when painting portraits in Rembrandt pastels was Gold Ochre. Duo Aqua doesn't include this pigment. So I looked for it in Talens water-mixable oils, Cobra. They don't include Gold Ochre but I bought a number of the earth pigments to try them. 

Cobra paints appear to contain more oil than Duo Aqua and they dry slightly slower. The pigments still weren't the exact colours that I hoped for. 

Then I did some research (on Google) and discovered that small amounts of ordinary oils can be mixed with water-mixable oils. As I wanted to mix small amounts of Gold Ochre with a lot of white, I bought a couple of Talens Rembrandt oil paints including Gold Ochre! That worked brilliantly for the portrait of my friend who has a very pale creamy complexion. 

Her portrait is nearly finished. I am waiting for it to dry completely so I can glaze another colour over her hair. She doesn't like it as I painted it but I am not going to paint it again. It will take too long. I hope that glazing it with umber will make her happy. I will post the result next week. 

After that success, I continued to investigate possibilities and I discovered that Schminke make mediums that mix with ordinary oil paints to make them water mixable. I bought a tube of their gel and a bottle of the liquid medium. And as I loved painting in Schminke pastels (they were like painting with butter!) I bought some Schminke oil paints. Their Mussini paints are of wonderful quality and they sell Natural Raw Umber, Natural Burnt Umber and Natural Burnt Sienna so I bought them and have fallen in love with them. I took advantage of a sale to buy some more interesting colours as you can see in the photo above. 

Schminke Mussini paints dry slower than the Cobra paints and may be more glossy but I am not sure about that. Time will tell. And if I have matte and gloss areas on my portraits, varnish will cure that. 

It is important to keep adding the medium or the oil paint and water separate out. But a bit more medium cures the problem straight away. 

Because the pigments are different in every brand, I have been making colour charts. They are not good colour charts, but they show the differences. 

Below is a photo of my colour charts taken under artificial lighting so the colours are nowhere near accurate but it gives the idea.

Cat in the Studio

Cat in the Studio

I haven't been able to do as much painting as I hoped this week. I had a fall on Monday and landed heavily on my right knee. I was in so much pain and I couldn't walk never mind sit at the easel. By Wednesday I was able to do some drawing while sitting in my easy chair in the kitchen. That evening I was able to stand and transfer a new portrait onto a canvas. I paid for it yesterday though. My knee became so uncomfortable.

This morning I was able to get back to the portrait of my friend. I was playing with the colours. I am getting a skin tone that I am happy with, by mixing a lot of white with a small amount of gold ocre and a hint of light oxide red to take the yellow out of it. I am using water mixable oil paints, but the gold ochre that I want is an ordinary oil paint. Luckily you can mix small amounts of oil paint with a greater quantity of water-mixable oil paint without losing the water mixable aspect.

After lunch, I got back to my easel raring to go, to find Pumpkin asleep on the lid of the palette. I hope you can see him in the photo. So I went upstairs to fetch a ceramic palette. I had been using it for acrylics so I had to clean it. 

I like to use ceramic palettes. I like the ones with round dimples. The paint doesn't dry so fast and stick so tight on ceramic. When I'm not painting I keep each one in an airtight food storage tub. 

I want to mention my favourite brushes as well. I have a couple in the pot on the window sill. The ones with a white handle are made of memory hair. The brand name is KUM. I buy them from CultPens. I don't know if anyone else sells them in the UK.

Getting on with the Portrait

Getting on with the Portrait

I have continued to experiment with the skin colour as painted in water mixable oils.

I read that I could add conventional oil paint and it would still be water mixable as long as I only used a small quantity. I bought a small number of oil paints including gold ochre which I used to find very useful for skin. The new paints arrived today and they worked well. 

Portrait painters prefer that their subjects don't see the portrait until it is finished. My friend turned up unexpectedly on Sunday afternoon. I would have hidden the painting if I had known. She was worried about the "wrinkles". I was thinking about the lines on her forehead and it was later that I realised she probably meant the construction lines round her eyes. The portrait won't look anything like that when it is finished. Her mouth is tight in the reference photo but I will soften her expression a lot. 

I like the paint to dry off between painting sessions. So I have started another portrait, but because I was struggling with skin colour at the time, I chose to paint a black and white dog. The dog is a crossbred Jack Russell terrier and I caught a lovely smiling moment from her. 

You won't be able to see it clearly but she is pencilled into the hole in the middle of the painting. I paint the surroundings first because the fur/hair has to be brushed over the grass. 

Studio Changes

 

Studio Changes

I have been very busy fussing with changes to my studio for the last few months. 

There are two reasons. The most important reason is that I am starting a new project. I am painting a series of portraits in oil on canvas. I will have a solo exhibition of them in June 2018.

The second reason is that I have had a nasty rash on my leg that meant I have had to sit with my leg propped up on a stool since last October. Because of that I haven't been able to use my usual painting table where I paint while sitting on a gas lift bar stool. (I couldn't find a footstool high enough 😉) So I have been painting and drawing small portraits on the kitchen table. But I have commissions for some big portraits and I have my project. I will say more about that in my next post. 

The result was that I spent a lot time online looking at easels that would let me sit with my leg up. I bought a table easel that would hold a bigger canvas but I couldn't get on with it, and l didn't like the idea of painting in oils on the kitchen table. 

So I set up my old easel in the lounge and it was very crowded. This week, I decided that it is no longer a lounge. It is a studio where I entertain guests. I rearranged the furniture. There was a plan chest under the window which I moved to the other wall where there was an easy chair. The chair has been moved to the kitchen (in the way of the oven). The easel is now in the perfect place where it gets the north light. 

The photo shows my new setup with the portrait I am working on. It is my first attempt at an oil painting. I am using water mixable oils. There are a few different brands. The first ones I bought were Duo Aqua Oil and I like them very much except I have been struggling to get the skin colours that used to be so easy in pastels. I bought a few Cobra oil paints to see if that burnt umber was the colour I remembered. It wasn't. The Cobra paints are more oily and don't suit me so well. 

I checked and you can mix normal oils with water mixable ones so I have bought some but it will be ages before they arrive. 

Meanwhile I have managed to mix a nice skin colour with burnt sienna and Quinacridone Gold and lots of white. I thought the Gold was too powerful to be useful but a tiny bit takes the pasty pink out of the burnt sienna.

I have also been experimenting with different brushes. I like KUM Memory Point brushes for my gouache paintings and I bought some in different shapes and sizes to try.

The water mixable paints dry faster than normal oils and it is a good idea to have a palette with a tight lid like for acrylics. I don't imagine that the kind with a reservoir and a semi permeable membrane would work right but you might like to try. Let me know. 

While I was about all this paint shopping, I bought a Daylight bulb for my worklight which is turned on in the photo. It has been a damp dismal day. 

Postscript: my leg is getting much better now.