Page 13 - Artist Materials Advisor

In the 17th century, Roger de Piles described in precise detail the flesh tone palette used by nearly every artist of that time in his seminal treatise, Les Élémens de Peinture Pratique. This painting manual influenced artists for several hundred years and established the current practice of setting a limited palette and a rational approach to painting portraits among the greatest artists of that period. In this article, we translate chapter four from the original 1684 French manual and explain how contemporary artists can set the limited 17th-century palette for flesh tones using Rublev Colours® Artists’ Oils...

The best practice for preparing Dibond (tradename for a brand aluminum composite materials or ACM) for oil painting...

It’s not often that a brand-new fine art medium comes along. Ceracolors is a new artist-grade paint made from quality pigments in a water-soluble wax binder. Although made from wax, Ceracolors are not encaustic paints because they do not require heat, solvents, or mediums...

When used in its most specific sense, the word “resin” is a hydrocarbon secretion of many plants, particularly coniferous trees. The resin produced by these plants is a viscous liquid composed mainly of volatile terpenes. Oleoresins are naturally occurring mixtures of oil and resin. Other resinous products in their natural condition are a mixture of gum or mucilaginous substances and are known as “gum resins.” Mastic gum is a good example of a gum resin...

Oleogel was featured in Rob Anderson’s Road Test column in the October 2013 issue of The Artist’s Magazine. Rob writes about Oleogel: “What exactly does adding Oleogel to paint do? Oleogel maintains the body of the paint—say goodbye, in other words, to drippy paint—at the same time it increases the paint’s transparency. The medium is versatile enough that it can be used for a thick impasto and also for glazing. The fact that this medium is this versatile is something I’ve never seen before. In my experience, a medium typically is only good for one thing, either glazing or helping to extend and thicken the paint, but not both. All in all, I had a very positive experience using Oleogel. The increase in fluidity and simultaneous control were wonderful surprises. I plan on continuing to use the medium, making it a part of my painting process.”...

Ochers are natural iron oxide earths found in many parts of the world. They are among the most lightfast and stable pigments used in the arts. Iron oxide pigments produce a wide range of colors, from black through shades of purple and red in the anhydrous oxides to yellow, orange, and brown in the oxide hydroxides. While iron oxide produces the color in ochers, other minerals—such as quartz and clays, for example—are also present...

I push Oleogel on all my friends, and I’ve even done time for selling it in a schoolyard. After using it regularly for the past year and a half, I’ve come up with various uses for it, and I thought I might share them. For those who haven’t come across this term before, “couche” is French for “paint layer,” and in the context of classical technique, a couche is a thin layer of oil that you spread over an area that you are about to work on, usually an area that you are going to bring to a finish with fine detail and blending. The oil makes the fresh paint flow onto the surface better (great if you’re working with tiny amounts of paint on little itty bitty brushes) and simultaneously saturates the old paint layer so that you can match your colours perfectly. Snort. As if anyone manages that...

The simplest way to create an impasto surface is to apply large amounts of paint, usually with a brush or palette knife. Commercial oil colors have a heavy consistency, which can be achieved by working directly from the tube and applying the colors in thick layers. Opacity and built-up texture are usually interrelated, with much of the thickest impasto consisting of solid and opaque pigments, such as lead white or titanium white. Passages of thickly applied paint can also be translucent, so extender pigments are chosen that supply both bulk and transparency...

Chrome yellow enjoyed a brief history of widespread use among nineteenth-century artists, such as Turner, Manet, Cézanne, Monet, and Pissarro. Cézanne, like Pissarro and Monet, used the neutralizing effect of combining three primary colors—ultramarine, vermilion, and chrome yellow—to make colored grays. Its popularity soon faded because a more stable opaque pigment, cadmium yellow, was introduced in the middle of the century...

Impasto is paint laid on a canvas or panel in quantities that make it stand out from the surface and is usually thick enough that brush or palette knife strokes are visible. The first known use of the word was in 1784, from the Italian impasto, the noun of the verb impastare, “to put in paste.” The heavy viscosity and slow drying time of oil paint make it a suitable medium for the impasto painting technique. Watercolor and tempera paint are not satisfactory for this technique because they lack these properties and do not form continuous films surrounding pigment particles...