Oil

Oil Paints

Painting is nearly as old as civilization, dating back to the ancient Mediterranean Greeks, Romans and Egyptians.  Their techniques of mixing encaustics (wax) and natural minerals are well documented.  Basic colorants were those found naturally in their landscape.  Those minerals initially included copper, manganese oxide and iron and the wax was most likely bees wax.  Oils such as flax oil, walnut and poppy seed were used in culinary applications, but there is no evidence of them being used in paintings of this period.  Tempera (dry colorant made of minerals and oxides and then combined with binder and water) was combined with essential oils to make a more resilient material.  Often the oil was used as a covering over a tempera work to stabilize the art.  The tempera binders used by Italian artisans included such things as whole egg, milk or animal glue. 

By the end of the Roman Empire and up to the Renaissance (15^th century), these ancient techniques were all but abandoned.  At that time Italian and Greek artists used olive oil in their secret process of creating oil paints.  This secrecy of the Italian and Greek formulas allowed their dominance of the painting world for nearly three centuries. The use of olive oil did, however, greatly lengthen the drying time of the paint.  During this time, drying oils - those that aided in hastening drying times - were introduced.  Some of the early examples included linseed oil, with poppy seed and walnut oils being used to a lesser degree.  All these oils were aided with the heat of the sun for speeding the drying of the paints.  Some choices were less inclined to crack, yellow and darken than the linseed oil.

One of the first examples of this radical new technique is van Eyck’s famous painting Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife – The Wedding Portrait (1434).  This painting clearly displays the effect of multi layering (what is now referred to as glazing) and the visual brilliance it projects.  The layers of oil, dried between applications, allowed for pigments to float and create a translucence and color intensity not before seen.  From this time on, it is oil paint and the results it gives that make paintings in that media so appealing.  Leonardo da Vinci improved the technique by slowly boiling the oil with an addition of bees wax.  The resulting media did not darken as much as the components without wax.  Other artists such as Tintoretto and Rubens studied earlier formulas and created their own, proving that artists were personally responsible for calculating and formulating their own paints. 

While it takes far more than technique to create a masterpiece, the methods of the time have endured with gradual modification/alteration and are researched and practiced by artists to this day.  How oils are made today is also similar to their original components but they are far more refined and scientifically calculated.   To insure a stable compound and colors that can be trusted from tube to tube/purchase to purchase, those calculations are closely guarded and monitored for extreme quality.  Non-edible oils are the backbone of formulas that can stand the elements and give workable performance to even the most discriminating artist.  Today, specialized oils such as bladderpod, sandmat, ironweed and calendula plant extracts are used to increase resistance and to decrease drying time.  The superior drying qualities, along with non-yellowing appearance and enhanced surface strength, made these oils more appealing. 

Although the luminosity of oils is never questioned, there are certain qualities of working in oils that are worth consideration.  The media is still slow drying when compared to almost any other media.  That can be a good thing if working in abbreviated sessions is your style.   Quick painters must develop a way to continue their approach.  Oil is easily blended with paint that is already on the surface.  Until dry, reworking is easy and often becomes a “style” all its own.  On-canvas blending is part of the beauty of this soft, malleable paint.  Vivid and dynamic colors are possible in oil, more than almost any other media.  Air does not cause an evaporation of oil paint as it does with water media.  Instead, oils oxidize into a dry, strong surface.  As an oil painting dries, the molecules of the paint bond to form a permanent and very resilient surface.  It can be said that an oil painting never stops changing. 

Pigments used in oil paints can be toxic.  Copper, arsenic sulfide and others of lesser danger are components in the creation of oils.  The thinners and cleaning materials, turpentine and odorless mineral spirits, are toxic if mishandled.  Therefore, always exercise caution and never eat, drink or smoke in the painting studio.

In summary, if you are not an oil painter, it is a medium that is well worth trying.  The luminous qualities, the translucency possible and the colors available are very exciting and offer much experimentation.  And remember to thank all the artists from centuries ago for all they contributed to today’s materials.  See your retailer and visit www.davincipaints.com and www.savoirfaire.com.

Art Events

Schedules sometimes change, so be sure to confirm events in advance.

Art Basel – Miami Beach (FL) takes place Dec. 6–9 at the Miami Beach Convention Center.  Two hundred of the world’s leading art galleries for modern and contemporary art will display artworks by more than 2,000 artists.  www.artbaselmiamibeach.com.

The Getty Center 10th Anniversary Celebration kicks off in Los Angeles, CA, on Dec. 15 with a day of fun that will feature family activities, a photo booth, free refreshments and more.  A reflective line-up of events and exhibitions will be held throughout the year.  Learn more at http://www.getty.edu/about/10years.html?cid=egetty072.

The Winter Show – Santa Fe (NM) will be held Dec. 29-30 at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe.  In addition to antiques, fine art, ethnographic and folk art, this show has recently been expanded to include modernism in design and art.  http://www.antiquities-shows.com/index.html

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian will host a Holiday Art Market on Dec. 8-9 at the museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and at the museum’s George Gustav Heye Center in New York City.  This is an opportunity to buy traditional and contemporary Native works from 35 select Native artists.  http://www.americanindian.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=events&second=ny&third=special

Kids’ Korner

Holiday Fun and Creativity

Holiday ornaments can be created from materials in nearly every home and for just pennies.  One idea is to create “stained glass” ornaments.  These ornaments will add charm and sparkle to any area you decorate, but are especially lovely on a holiday tree with lights that catch and reflect colors.

Materials you will need are:  cardboard or heavy paper (like shirt cardboard); aluminum foil; white glue; patterns for ornaments in simple shapes; markers in a variety of colors; pencil; and hanging ribbon or yarn.

The first step is to cut your cardboard or heavy paper into the shape of an ornament.  Large circle shapes with a square top-knot and a slightly pointed bottom are great. 

When the shape is cut, draw lines to divide the ornament shape into sections.  Use the bead of glue to define the shapes.  Allow the first side to dry, and then add lines/sections to the back side of the ornament if desired.

Once the glue is totally dry, cover the ornament with foil.  Gently press the foil over the raised glue lines and into the recesses, creating a high/low look.  Use your markers to color in the low areas between the lines under the foil.  The result will look like a stained glass ornament with colored areas and silver divisions. 

Pierce a hole at the top of the ornament and hang by a length of ribbon or yarn.  As simple as these instructions sound, the results are really dashing!  The ornaments look far more complicated or technical than they actually are. 

Another simple holiday decoration can be made by recycling old holiday greeting cards to create a wonderful keepsake Advent Calendar.  Start with a piece of red felt (or a bright red place mat) onto which you draw a grid containing 25 days. 

For each of the 25 days, cut out a holiday shape from your recycled holiday cards.  To use the calendar, select and glue a shape onto the grid for each day starting December 1^st and ending December 25^th.  What you complete is a great collection of images and a wonderful holiday decoration for years to come.  You could create a collection of colorful calendars over several years.

To decorate the holiday dining table, consider making a neat holiday table runner.  It can be made easily from holiday gift wrap as a base or use an inexpensive store-bought runner to which you add your own personal touches.  Metallic pipe cleaners can be shaped into holiday designs such as holly leaves or stars and glued to the runner.  If the runner is smooth paper or fabric, use holiday stamps and colorful stamp pads to create striking looks.  Metallic markers can be used to draw designs and markers are great for added color. 

There are many ways to decorate for the holidays that can be so much fun.  Look for unique things that will set your décor apart from others.  Try new color combinations.  Transform simple ornaments into dynamic new ones just by adding cutouts, glitter glue, layers of tissue paper glued with overlapping edges, etc. Happy Holidays!

Adventures in Wonderland

The Children’s Museum of Atlanta presents Alice’s Wonderland through January 13.  In this interactive exhibit kids can follow Alice down the rabbit hole and discover a world filled with adventure, wonder and learning. Visit www.imagineit-cma.org.  CMA is ideal for children age 8 and younger.

Best Illustrated Books

The gift-giving season is upon us, so you may wish to consider the New York Times Book Review’s choices

of the 10 best illustrated children’s books of 2007.  Chosen were Every Friday, Dan Yaccarino, Holt (ages 3-7); Jabberwocky, Christopher Myers, Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children (ages 5-9); The Arrival, Shaun Tan, Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic (ages 10 and up); First The Egg, Laura Vaccaro Seeger, Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (ages 2-6); Not a Box, Antoinette Portis, HarperCollins (ages 2-6); 600 Black Spots, David A. Carter, Little Simon/Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing (ages 3 and up); The Frog Who Wanted to See the Sea, Guy Billout, Creative Editions (ages 7 and up); The Wall—Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, Peter Sis, Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (ages 8 and up); Old Penn Station, William Low, Holt (ages 5-9); and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick, Scholastic (ages 9 and up).

Art Tools

Handy Tools for Artists

All artists have favorite tools and methods for their use.  They use tools to achieve the looks they want and have proven over time and through diligence that these tools work.  But what if you are a budding artist and don’t know what tools are available?  Or perhaps you have used the same tools forever and are looking for something to add to your paint box and your skill level.  This just might make a difference in success or mega success, so consider the following:

Chamois scraps are not used by all pastel and charcoal artists but perhaps they should be.  These small natural skins contain the remains of organic oils and a “furry” surface that lifts powdery media with ease.  Chamois do not release the powder they pick up until they are shaken, so there is less likelihood of smudges or smears if careful pickup of unwanted pastel or charcoal is undertaken.  Chamois can also be invaluable when cleaning dirty pastel sticks and shards.  When you want an instantly clean stick, just massage it with a scrap of chamois.  This will also work wonders to clean a work area without moisture.  Just run the chamois over the work surface and all the dust adheres to the skin.

Color shapers are brush handles with soft rubber chisel tips, available in a good variety of shapes and widths.  They move color – wet acrylics and watercolor - especially well, and they are easily cleaned with a damp cloth immediately after use.  Long-lived and flexible, color shapers are very useful in gouging through new paint to reveal the underlying surface tone.

A mahlstick can be made of metal, wood or even plastic, but throughout history painters have used a stick to support a hand so that they might work over wet areas.  These handy tools give the painter a hand rest that does not disturb the painting already done.  The rounded end is placed against the edge of the stretched canvas or canvas panel or on a dry portion of the painting.  The opposite end (usually bulbed for easy grip) is held with a free hand so that the painter’s work hand can rest on the support.  Simple and straightforward and very useful!  In a pinch you can make your own with a smooth dowel or small tree branch.

Eyedroppers can be used to dispense almost any liquid art material from ink and paint to glue.  Keep one close by and you will soon discover many uses for this inexpensive, readily available liquid lifter/dispenser.

Common household paintbrushes offer a quick way to lay on massive amounts of paint, be it watercolor, acrylic or oil.  Use only new or very clean brushes to insure there is no contamination.  Bristle brushes give a great even application when layering gesso.  They are sturdy and long-lived if cleaned well after each use.  Synthetic bristles are strong and can be a good way to apply very large areas of even tones in watercolor or acrylic. 

Large house painting brushes have another practical application in art.  If you find yourself stuck in a rut of picky detail, do a painting using a very large paintbrush.  You simply cannot accomplish small detail with a huge brush so you automatically loosen up and get free!  Fun is to repaint an image where you originally used small brushes, but paint the new work with house painting sizes.  You may be amazed at the relaxing and re-energizing result.

Sponges are the wonder tool of the water media painter!  Paint removal, paint application, textural additions, topical speckling, and washes:  You name it; a sponge is up to the task.  Natural sea sponges or synthetic, they both work wonders for light texturing, faux finishes, general texturing of natural items such as tree leaves or trunks, etc.

Some art tools don’t look like art tools.  Chopsticks can be used as calipers to hold down stencils when airbrushing; and they can be used as texturing tools or scribers when working in wet acrylic or watercolor. 

Plastic wrap can be used to slow the drying of acrylic paints on your palette.  Just put a layer over the dabs of color.  When you remove the plastic, wad it up with the paint to the outside and roll the resulting pigment crackles onto blotter paper or cardstock to create the beginning of neat note cards or monotype prints.

Safety razor blades can be used to scrape paint from paper or make small corrections on pencil or ink drawings.  Care must be used to take only the top layer of paper so that the correction will not be noticed.  If you scrape the blade sideways across the drawing rather than gouge the ink or paint away, the surface damage is minor.

The Artist’s Marketplace

Any of the following products would make a fine gift/stocking stuffer for the artist(s) on your list.

New Inkjet Products from Strathmore

Strathmore’s new Inkjet Radiant Gloss is a premium glossy sheet with a distinctive pearl-like surface that produces an image similar to that of a quality silver halide photo paper.  The Gloss White sheets, measuring 8.5” x 11”, come 20 sheets per package.  And the new Inkjet Photo Albums from Strathmore come complete with solid black poly cover and binding hardware with 20 sheets of pre-punched gloss/matte photo paper for a total of 40 pages.  Available in 8” x 8” and 8.27” x 11.69”, these will make a great personalized album for a holiday gift.  www.strathmoreartist.com.

New Zazzo Makeup FX Airbrush Templates and DVD by Bradley M. Look

Zazzo USA has introduced the new Makeup FX Templates and DVD by renowned makeup artist Bradley M. Look.  He takes you behind the scenes of Hollywood makeup artistry to demonstrate not only beauty applications using the airbrush, but also how to create alien characters.  Using the newly developed Makeup FX Template Series he created for Zazzo, The Beauty Ensemble and The Character Troupe, Brad shares valuable information along the way which will help makeup artists airbrush more effectively in the growing age of the High Definition format in the entertainment field. www.ZazzoUSA.com.

New Triple-Action Handle from Iwata-Medea

Iwata-Medea has introduced the new Triple Action Handle invented by Gentry Riley. The new handle gives you instant access to the needle for quick and easy replacement of your needle and fast needle flushing.  A unique pre-set handle feature actually holds the needle back from the nozzle instead of limiting trigger movement, allowing for more consistent spray time after time.  An added bonus to the Triple Action Handle is a threaded needle knob on the rear of the handle to store your needle cap!  The handle gives you an effective solution to your airbrush cleaning process. Iwata-Medea’s Triple Action Handle is sold as a set with one silver handle/accessories or a set with five colored handles (silver, orange, blue, red and green)/accessories.  www.iwata-medea.com.

New Watercolor Book 

Watercolour Landscapes by Terry Harrison is ideal for people who want to learn to paint but may not possess ideal drawing skills.  In this book you’ll find a materials/equipment list, instructions, step-by-step photographs and five easy-to-follow landscape projects.  But also included are six reusable pull-out tracings with instructions on how to transfer the images to your watercolor paper.  A pad of paper, a selection of watercolors, brushes and this book will make a great holiday gift for a beginning artist! 48 pages, Search Press.

Airbrush

Kustom Airbrushing

The SEMA Show is the premier automotive specialty products event and was recently held in Las Vegas, NV.  Last year the Iwata-Medea booth exhibited kustomized autos as well as various items such as refrigerators and plastic mannequins.  This year they had some of the same with the addition of kustomized paint jobs on guitars, large Tiki heads made from fiberglass, and incredible free-standing plastic/metal sculptures that included humorous sayings.  Along with these items there was also a grouping of large flat paintings done on metal surfaces with automotive paint that were the epitome of kustom artwork. 

There have been many innovations in the automotive paint industry, with a wide selection of paints designed for spray painting and airbrushing.  The paints, such as those from House of Kolor, are both water soluble and mineral based and are readily available at both automotive paint supply stores and in some art supply stores.  Their compatibility with plastic and metal surfaces opens up a new array of objects that can be kustomized. 

When working on metal and plastic surfaces, a few things should be considered: 

(1) When preparing the surface for painting, make sure that it is extremely clean.  It should be washed with a prep solution, available wherever industrial or automotive paints are sold.  There are specific ones for plastic surfaces and others for metal.  The prep solutions will thoroughly clean the surface before painting and remove not only dirt and grime, but also oil from fingerprints, grease and lubricants.  At the same time they prepare the surface for paint adhesion by slightly etching the surface.

(2) There is a variety of stenciling materials that can be used on these surfaces:  frisket film, self-adhering vinyl, handmade acetate stencils, tape and laser-cut Artool templates.  A stencil, mask or template is required when you want to achieve a hard-edge line.  Whenever using a self-adhering stencil, make sure that it is compatible with the surface to which it is being applied so that the paint doesn’t lift upon removal (although automotive paints are extremely durable when dry). 

Since not all items you may be kustomizing are portable for transport to your studio, there will be instances where it’s necessary to work on location.  Make sure that you protect nearby walls, floors and other objects from overspray by covering them with sheets of plastic (available in rolls); have good ventilation, using portable fans; and wear a carbon filter respirator.

With the variety of paints available to the airbrush artist today, the items that can be kustomized are endless.

Free Newsletter

Visit www.airbrushtalk.com for the FREE new issue of AirbrushTalk, a bi-monthly e-newsletter for airbrush enthusiasts.  Articles include Greeting Cards – For Holidays or Anytime by Janean S. Thompson, Leave it to Cleaver by Wes Hawkins, Bringing Out the Beast – Using Vinyl Stencils to Make Your T-Shirts Come Alive! by Thomas Adams, and Top Artist Competition – Learning and Product Expo:  ART! – Pasadena 2007 by Donn Shanteau. While there, sign up for your FREE subscription.

ArtPourri

Medal Recipients Announced—President Bush has presented awards to the 2007 National Medal of Arts recipients.  Among the 10 selected were arts patrons Roy R. Neuberger and Henry Steinway and painters George Tooker and Andrew Wyeth. Among the 10 recipients of the National Humanities Medal was the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, Dallas, TX.

Auction Results – Recent sales of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York brought sales of $472.9 million for Christie’s and $331.4 million for Sotheby’s.  Records were set for artists such as Franz Marc, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Paul Signac.  At the evening sale of Contemporary Art in New York, Sotheby’s achieved the highest sale total in a 263-year history.  Thirteen artist records were established and Francis Bacon’s Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1 commanded $45.9 million, the top lot of the two-week series of sales.

Traditional Christmas Stamp Issued – The U.S. Postal Service has selected Italian Renaissance painter Bernardino Luini’s oil-on-panel entitled The Madonna of the Carnation (circa 1515) for its 2007 traditional Christmas stamp (a slightly cropped version).  Luini used oil paints (then a relatively new medium) and enhanced his typically warm palette with the technique known as sfumato (an Italian word meaning “smoky”).

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Copyright ARTtalk Vol. 18 No. 2 — December 2007