What paints do I use? Oils or Acrylics?

What paints do I use?

I am often asked about what paints I use?  As in what brands and what type of paint, even what palette of colours do I use. I hope to address all these questions in this blog. These are very important questions which have to be considered before you start tackling a painting.

I have regularly dabbled with  acrylics, water colours even water colour crayons, but it is always oils that I come back to. Acrylics have the advantage of drying quickly. I find they often dry too quickly as they have a limited open time when the paint can be reworked especially on the palette. Yes, you can use drying inhibitors, but they tend to make the paints more transparent and often I want a dense colour that obliterates what is underneath and is not affected by the colour underneath. Furthermore, acrylic colours always dry with a colour shift. Often manufactures claim minimal colour shift, where the colour dries only slightly less darker than what was originally painted, but it is always there, which can be very frustrating if you want to revise an area but blend it into a surrounding area. It is never totally satisfactory.

Another problem I find with acrylics is that with the best will in the world there is always a build up of paint at the base of the hairs  in a brush and this can affect the ability of the brush to keep its point over time.

 

 Well what about water colours? They are quick, easy to apply, easy to create an even area of colour in a wash, especially useful for sky’s, but  you  have to remember that you start from the lights to the darks as they are transparent and the white of the paper is your white. This is the reverse of opaque paints like acrylics and oils where to make a colour light you add white.

 

So with water colours you start from the light areas of say the outside of a tree and then work into the darker irregular areas of the inside of a tree. This I find can be problematic for the effects I want to create. Then there is one big problem. If you want to changes something, life becomes very problematic and often the whole painting can be spoilt

So I come to oil colours. I love oils, for their flexibility of use and their strength of colour. They are an opaque colour. As I have already mentioned before, white is added to the colour to lighten it. Making revisions is easy because the colours are so dense and pigmented. Yes, they can be slow to dry. I find  whites which have poppy seed oil or linseed oil as a medium particularly slow to dry. I find this frustrating when I have, “ blocked a painting in” the undercoat stage, and want to go onto the next stage, or to do a recoat to make the areas of colour more solid.

Griffin Alkyd paint

Help is at hand. I have the solution. Winsor and Newton make a brand of paint called Gryffin, using a modified alkyd resin which dry’s more quickly than ordinary oil colours. Lack of interest by artists has meant that they are now quite tricky to find. I use the Gryffin Titanium white. I find that if not used within the day these colours tend to dry and get wasted on the palette so I still use standard oil colours as well. To encourage these to dry more quickly I use a little Winsor and Newton Liquin medium when I mix up a colour. And as the colours comes out of the tube in quite a stiff buttery consistency the medium helps to make the paint easier to apply.

Another problem often encountered with oil colours is the smell. Turpentine or even white Spirit for cleaning brushes has a pungent odour, Which can be very off putting. There is a solution. There are low /no odour brush cleaners and paint dilutants which are just as effective.

          Then we come to the question: what colours do I use in my palette? I have experimented with many brands over the years and looking at my paint tray I still have Rowney colours, Michael Harding colours and Winton Colours but predominantly I use Winsor and Newton Artists Colours. I really like these colours. They are so strong. They come out of the tube as an intense rich colour. You certainly don’t get that with acrylic colours. These colours are so intense that mixing together an Alizarin Crimson (red), Ultramarine Blue (blue)  and Raw Sienna (yellow) makes a most effective dark shade colour which is better than black for shades. Black I find tends to get over used by people and tends to deaden colours and paintings as a whole. So these three colours regularly act as my red blue and yellow, the three primary colours. I am amazed sometimes at just how much I can achieve with just these three colours in a painting. For particular parts of the landscape however, I will add to my palette. For example;

For the sky I will often use cobalt, Coeruleum or Winsor blues in various combinations of mixtures along with Winsor reds , alizarin Crimson and Raw Sienna depending on the mood of the sky but I avoid ultramarine. Its too  dark and purply.

For buildings I will often use Ultramarine, Alizarine  Crimson,  Winsor Red, Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber and Burnt Sienna.

For Vegetation I particularly use; Winsor Blues, Prussian Blue, Cobalt Blue, Winsor Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Raw Sienna, even adding Winsor Reds and Alizarin Crimsons to create more natural  greens

What ever I paint I try not to mix more that two or three colours together otherwise all you get is a muddy mess. Its all about looking carefully at what I see and translating accurately what I see onto the canvas. Paints are my tool not my master. I am not interested in paint for its own sake I am interested in using paints to create what I see and enjoy in the world.