Pastoral

Up until recently I used Liquin as my oil painting medium. It had many advantages, like quick drying, but what I liked most was the lack of the ‘greasy’ effect caused by the oils like Linseed.  As a result, any reference to Liquin in the forums I visit, always grabs my attention. I still have suspicions that its not the miracle medium to solve all my oil painting problems. I have come to the conclusion that only time will tell if it is a safe replacement for the standard oils.

The time honoured rule of ‘fat over lean’ works well with standard oils. This translates as the final layers of paint having a higher oil content and therefore are more flexible sitting on the less flexible foundation. Also, the under layers dry quicker so you don’t end up with a skin of dry paint over a wet under layer.

Introduce Liquin and the old rules no longer apply especially if some paint layers have Liquin and others oil. Liquin as an under layer dries quickly like the ‘lean’ but in its dry state is more flexible than the equivalent oil. Used in final layers it will eventually be more flexible than oil based under layers but will dry so quickly it will seal off any oil layers underneath and restrict its drying. I can see why Windsor & Newton recommend not using the different mediums in a painting.

For a long time I put a few drops of Liquin into Linseed Oil and mixed them well together. This would seem to be a safe way of using Liquin and oils in the same painting as the effect of the Liquin is applied uniformly.

My current working method does not have any of these issues. Firstly, I don’t use any medium at all, and secondly, I paint in a single layer, or alls prima, as its called. Be careful if you paint in distinct layers. If Liquin is used with other mediums I would make up a batch of the mix, enough for the entire painting, and use it from first layer to last, applying the ‘fat over lean’ rule. Also, if the paint is required to flow, use solvent not medium to thin it.

Here is the video of the painting process. See you soon.

Prelude to a Storm

Colour can create atmosphere and I was trying to convey that pre-storm mugginess in this painting. There are no clean clear colours especially in the sky. Its a little bit tricky as a disastrous mess is never too far away. As you will see in this video I placed quite a lot of green (Sap Green) straight from the tube into the sky area. The next hour was spent gradually bringing this back to an acceptable sky colour. Once this was reached I progressed to the painting of the lower part of the painting. The same four colours, used in the sky, were used, but the proportions of each were different of course.

In conveying an atmosphere or feeling in a painting, apart from colour, the composition can help in a less dramatic way. This composition does not follow the classical rules. There is a knife edge balance. If we view this layout in purely abstract terms the shapes are balanced on the point of the triangle formed by the road. Its a bit like a see-saw, as the different elements are placed on one side of the fulcrum, the balance is upset and has to be restored by placing something on the other side. There were several times, in the early stages of the painting process, when the balance was completely askew. Before the leaning branch of the tree was painted was one such occasion. So you have to flit around the the entire surface, not concentrating too much on one particular area in case its pushed so far the balance cannot be restored. The end result is an ‘unease’ in the landscape which is the point of the painting.

Here is the video of the painting process. See you soon.

Bridge at Kilkea

Shimmering light and the buzz of high summer is the inspiration for this painting. There are preparations to harvest the winter corn, now in the final stages of ripening and the spring crop is in a state of arrested growth because of the lack of rain. The yields will be low this year.

A 3 colour painting again. This time the dominant colour is Cadmium Yellow. Its a standard oil colour as there is no Alkyd version. The blue is also a standard oil, Cobalt Blue, for the same reason. The third colour is Burnt Sienna and it, with the black and white are Alkyd colours. Again there is no medium used only White Spirits.

Here is the video of the painting process, which took about an hour and a half to complete, compressed to about 8 minutes. The size is 16″x12″ painted on Daler-Rowney Oil Painting Paper. As I mentioned before this seems to be too absorbent for standard oil colours but works well with Alkyd colours.

See you soon.

Summer Heat

As you are probably aware, for the last few months I’ve been using Alkyd quick drying oil paints. I like the way they work on the canvas as well as the speed of drying. These paints are not very popular with oil painters, who actually like the slow drying of standard oils. The principal use of Alkyd seems to be for underpainting, if you want to paint on a dry under-layer. If the colour is applied as an underpainting using solvent only, in 24 hours the layer is dry enough to proceed to the final stages. Acrylic paint is sometimes used as an underpainting but I think this is better as you are using a compatible paint which can be mixed with final colours if required. Although there are differences they are still the same medium.

The most popular Alkyd colour is Titanium White. Apparently many oil painters use this instead of the traditional white to speed up the drying. As white is usually used in the final layers and highlights these quick drying layers will be completely dry long before the under layers are dry. This is a recipe for cracking and flaking similar to using Liquin in the final layers of a multi layered painting.

I would sometimes add standard oils to the final layers of an Alkyd painting. This is because the range of Alkyd colours is a bit limited. For example, there is no Alkyd Cobalt Blue, only Cobalt ‘hue’, and its just not quite the same as the real thing.

Here is the video of this painting process. See you soon.