Solvents and Varnishes For Oil Paints
Lesson 3 from: Getting Started with Oil PaintsMary Jane Begin
Solvents and Varnishes For Oil Paints
Lesson 3 from: Getting Started with Oil PaintsMary Jane Begin
Lesson Info
3. Solvents and Varnishes For Oil Paints
Lessons
Class Introduction
06:06 2Colors of Oil Paints
15:16 3Solvents and Varnishes For Oil Paints
06:19 4Demo: Oil Paint Glazing Techniques
16:05 5Oil Painting Brushes & Palette Knives
08:01 6Demo: Oil Painting Brushes
14:34 7Demo: Oil Painting Palette Knives
08:15 8Oil Paints Tools and Supplies Q&A
04:22Lesson Info
Solvents and Varnishes For Oil Paints
The next thing I wanna talk about, and this is a very important aspect of oil paints, I'll just grab a surface because I wanna do some glazing. I've put some patches of color down, I would say roughly three weeks ago to make sure that they were fully dry so I could glaze over the color. And these colors are all fully dry now. But what I wanna show you is, with traditional oils, if you're cleaning the traditional oils, you would use what's called turpenoid, it's like turpentine, and it's odorless, but it does have, it's a strong chemical, so you definitely wanna be in a well ventilated space if you were doing traditional oils. I am not doing that here in this course because the ventilation isn't appropriate for this, but you would wanna be in a space that was pulling the air out of the room and circulating air regularly because it's a pretty strong substance. But this is what you use to thin the paint instead of water, it's what you use to clean your brushes, and in this case, this is j...
ust, all these materials are from Blick, this can be ordered from Blick as well, it's called turpenoid. Now for us today, we will be using something like turpenoid, but it's more, it's a solvent, but it's not the same solvent as the turpenoid, so it doesn't have the fumes, it's water soluble. So it actually acts very much like water, but in this case, with our water soluble oils, we can use water to thin the paint, we can use this solvent, which is called a thinner solvent, and it's just thinning the color, that's all it's doing. So we have two things we can choose. The other thing is we can use linseed oil. Now this is linseed oil that would be used for thinning out the color of a traditional oil that is not water soluble, and linseed oil is basically, it's oil that's keeping the vibrancy of the color. Water reduces the vibrancy of the color, and the solvent kind of reduces the vibrancy, but linseed oil is an oil, so it's thinning the color, but it's not desaturating it or taking the vibrancy out. So it's a beautiful medium to keep that color thinner and moving across the surface, it's also, I have two different versions here. This is linseed oil for water soluble paints, this is what we'll be using today. Basically the same thing, but it's been chemically created to work with water and not resist the water, it's a different kind of oil than traditional linseed oil. So these are the two that we'll be using today, and this solvent. I'm just gonna put those aside. The last things I wanna show you are basically, they're called varnishes, and a varnish is meant to seal, once an oil painting is completely finished, totally dry, you wanna seal that painting, primarily, we talked about dust previously Kenna, and with oils, dust is an issue. So you wanna work in a very well ventilated space that isn't dusty because the oils attract the dust, and there's nothing worse than when you look at your piece and you can see little speckles of dust all over it. Even if it doesn't record when you scan it, when you see the actual painting, it's not a happy thing to see a lot of dust. So you wanna be in a dust free environment, but you wanna also seal your painting with a varnish so that the varnish is basically resisting the dust, and the varnish also helps create a kind of vibrancy to the color, because it's creating another layer, a sort of almost like the linseed oil, it's creating another layer of thin glaze that you're looking through to look at the color. So this is, damar varnish is your sort of standard that you would use to seal that painting, but because again we're using water soluble paints today, we're not gonna use that, we're going to use something similar that is water soluble. There's two different types, very much like acrylics, you have your gloss varnish, which is shiny, and you have your matte varnish, which is matte, it's not shiny. So that's really based on preference. Some people love the shine of a picture, where it's got all this shine to it, other people don't, they like it matte. And for reproduction, the only thing I'll say is, gloss can have a tendency to reflect so much light that when you try to scan it or take a photograph, you're getting light reflection. So that's the only downside of using a gloss medium, whether it's acrylics or oils. So now I just wanna show you with the mediums, and I will mention too, Galkyd and Liquin are used with traditional oils, and those are also tools that are solvents that kind of thin the paint out and can make the color move across the surface, but we aren't using that for our water soluble paints today. Okay, so I've got some pre-test colors here, and as I mentioned, I think it's kind of important to know, I have an actual list of the colors and how long they take to try, and I'll just tell you the standard colors that dry really fast would be burnt umber, burnt sienna, Prussian blue, cobalt blue, and raw sienna. Those colors dry in a day, and I tested it. And that's your blues, super fast, they were dry in a day. Your cadmiums, alizarin crimson, most of your reds, your sap green, your ivory, black, they take so long to dry. This is cadmium red. I put a fan on these pieces because I was shipping them here to CreativeLive, and I wanted to make sure that we did not have wet oil paint being shipped. I left the fan on for three days straight, and this color right here, cadmium red, didn't dry 'til the fifth day. So you do have to be mindful, like if I wanna glaze over this, this has to be fully dry before I glaze over it. If the paint isn't fully dry, then there could be cracking. So you do wanna keep that in mind as you're painting, is that you're testing the dryness of the paint before you layer or glaze. If however, you want the color to move across the surface, then you want it to be wet so it's malleable and can mush.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
CG
I've been a silk painter for decades and am just starting out with oils. This course was extremely helpful, especially the demos. One thing--at the very end she says that with traditional oils you'll need to clean your hands with a solvent before washing with soap. Not a great idea if you want to be healthy. I remove pigment on my hands by rubbing a clean oil on them, then washing it all away with soap.