Basic oil paints - why oil?
6-6 BASIC OIL PAINTING
Painting in oils - what you need to know about the paint.
You can liken making paintings with oil paints as making mud pies with
different color mud or plaster
Why?
Oil paint usually has ‘thickness’ so it can be shovelled, spread, pushed,
trowelled, brushed and scraped - just like plaster or mud. It can be flattened or
piled up ... and much more.It has all these qualities if mixed correctly. Furthermore it can be made to be spread as thin as gossamer or as
thick as clay.
All this depends on just two things:
a) The thinness or thickness of the paint, called its viscosity
b) The implement you decide to use to push it around - knife, brush, stick, trowel.
So what sort of mud or paint will we make, how dry or how runny?Oil paint is made up of three main elements.- Pigment a powder made from ground rock or earth or root anything dry that is intense in color.
- Oil (medium)
- A drier of some sort as oil sometimes takes too long (a thinner)
You can try this:
Go to the kitchen and get a little powdered saffron, powdered red food or
cocoa and add a little oil (sunflower, poppy, walnut, safflower, it dosen't
really matter which) and mix it up with a knife or spoon. You have now
produced a genuine oil paint ( and unlike many others, one you could eat
it without harm). Find some zinc cream (used as a sunscreen) in the
bathroom cabinet and now you have a white oil paint - now some black
boot polish and you have a decent black oil paint.If it is a little thick or hard to mix you may add a little turpentine,
thinners or petrol which will obviously cause it to mix easier and dry
faster.Note: it is usually the chemical pigment or the thinners that causes the extremely poisonous nature of most
commercial oil paints (lead, cadmium and arsenic are old culprits). If the powder you use is unusually strong
you might be tempted to add a filler to bolster up the mixture. This could be chalk or ground marble or some
other neutral powder. Student oil paints usually have more filler than Artists' brands. Filler is cheaper than
pigment so you get what you pay for!http://www.geocities.com/~jlhagan/lessons/how_to_paint_in_oils.htm (1 of 3)1/13/2004 3:52:17 AM