I want to test...

…the strength of acrylic painting medium to see if it does what I think it does.

How I’m going to do this is add some medium to paint and make a transparent wash using very thin medium, I’ll then thin some more paint with water and compare them when they are dry - I also want to test thinned down paint with water then when that’s dry wash on the same medium over the top, so the medium dries on top of it not mixed in with it. When it’s all dry I can test the binding strength of each by scrubbing them with a wet brush and see if they hold.

Using the same paint I’ve made two squares of wash thinned with water and 1 square of wash thinned with medium (the middle one), and I notice that while they are wet they all look much the same.

perhaps there is a slight difference in how the brush marks are held in place with the medium but merge together a bit more with the water (like water paint).

Now I will give it some time to really dry and then brush some medium over the top of one of the watered down washes ( this is called sealing it), and then I’ll let it really dry overnight before I do the scrub test.

The results are this - the paint thinned with just water rubs off with a little effort, the paint thinned with medium needs a fair bit more effort to move the paint, but the paint sealed with medium doesn’t move at all with a hard scrub, which is a little surprising, but makes sense thinking about it.

Imagine the strength of paint thinned with medium then sealed with more of it - practically bullet proof!

a recorded the scrubbing part for the record.

and here’s a little story from my sketchbook.

Fat over lean…

…is paint speak for the principle in oil painting of applying paint with a higher oil content over paint with a lower oil content. This principal is important to follow if you want your paintings to “stand the test of time” and not crack because of uneven drying time. It’s not necessary to follow if you are playing around in your sketchbook, or similar, however.

What happens when you don’t follow the fat over lean principal is - as the painting slowly dries over many months, cracks might appear and this creates an unstable surface where moisture can get in, which can eventually cause the paint to flake and fall off.

don’t worry…

Many old oil paintings suffer from cracking, either fine and on the surface, or deeper cracks that go right down to the support, and the reasons as to why is not always clear. We do know that as oil paint cures it becomes less and less flexible, so more brittle and at the same time the support (canvas and possibly what it’s primed with) remains flexible, and the moment between the two can cause cracks in the more brittle surface paint. But these works are hundreds of years old, and if you’re playing around with oil painting today and one of those paintings is still around in a few hundred years time (destined to hang in a gallery or something), well…may as well let the restorers worry about any cracking problems that might pop up then. (big smile emoji)

The more oil in the paint the longer it takes to dry - actually oil doesn’t really dry, it cures, so if very oily paint (where pigment is mixed to transparency with a heavy oil medium) is layered down first and then painted over with a fast drying layer of paint mixed with solvent (solvent dries fast), or lean medium which dries faster than oily mediums but slower than solvent, the top layer dries much faster than what’s under it. When things dry they shrink. So if that fast drying shrinking layer is on top while the under layer is still trying to dry and so it’s slowly moving as it dries, this will cause the top layer to crack because it’s already dry and now that it’s dry it’s also inflexible. Inflexible dried paint can’t stretch with the movement of the drying paint that it’s sticking onto, so it cracks instead of stretching, breaking the seal.

This painting principal doesn’t apply to acrylic paint because acrylic mediums aren’t oily, are flexible when dry, they dry fast and they are binders (meaning they bind the paint together and to the surface. They are a kind of glue. However, thinning acrylic paint with water rather than medium does replace the binding strength with nothing (water evaporates), so very watered down paint that’s dried can easily be wiped off of the surface when brushing on the next layers of paint you put down if you’re not careful. Once the stronger top layers are dried however they bind with what’s underneath and that permanently fixes it.

So keeping these qualities of both oil and acrylic paint in mind, when using them together you should treat acrylic paint as lean, not fat. Also, because acrylic paint dries fast, doesn’t cure over months and is water soluble, it won’t stick to an oil painted surface. Think about it…what happens when you put water onto oil? It won’t sit on top, it won’t stick to it, so it pretty much falls off because it cant bind with the surface, the oil repeals water, and naturally wants to sit on the top.

Exceptions: there are some products that will convert an oil painted surface to accept acrylic paint and these are called universal primers. These are quality products that are designed for industrial and domestic interior and external cladding, and they do work over oil paintings too…and ofcourse you can always deliberately break the rules just to see what happens.

After writing this blog I thought I’d go around my home and see if any of my own oil paintings have started to crack - so far they are looking good and I can’t see any cracks.

and here’s a new oil painting that’s still drying…

Painting supports are...

…”any material onto which paint is applied.”

The most common supports are canvas, paper and board. Other, more exotic surfaces that artists paint on are metal, glass, linen, clay, plaster, porcelain, fibreglass and moulded plastics… …did I miss anything?

I usually paint on board, canvas and on paper in my sketchbooks.

Today I want to talk about boards - one of my favourite supports because they are sturdy, versatile, and can be inexpensive.

I like to keep on hand a stack of MDF (medium density fiberboard), pre-cut to size. The most economical way to do this is to buy a whole sheet from the local hardware store and have them cut it in store. Today I got myself 18 40x40cm squares out of 1 sheet and It cost me $7 to cut the $32 board up. That works out to around $2.20 a support.

I chose the 0.5cm thick board because I can put short staples straight into the back or very short screws to enable a means to hang without a frame. This board can be easily framed too if I choose to do that, and it’ll work with any kind of frame, with or without glass but it doesn’t need glass to cover it to protect it from damage when painted with acrylic and oil paint like paper does. It’s also strong and straight, doesn’t warp when painted on, is super smooth and paint sticks to it like glue, so it’s lovely to paint on, and…did I mention that it’s cheap?

I really enjoy preparing the boards, it’s therapeutic. I usually prepare 2 or 3 at a time. The prep turns into part of the painting process because I like to give them a bit of a rustic look with layers of paint and a bit of sanding around the edges, and I can get quite creative with this part of the process.

prep.

I like to give the boards a light sand around the edges and round off the corners which gives them an aged look.

I paint both sides…

and the edges with whatever acrylic paint I have laying around - sometimes I offload the paint left on my pallet from what I’ve been working on onto the boards - not much paint gets wasted around here.

Writing this blog made me think about whether MDF is environmentally friendly? Turns out that it can be because it can be made from recycled materials, and the most un-environmental thing about it is when it ends up in land fill. Hmmmm… One should look into buying discarded board from the salvage yard… …I wonder if they’d cut it up for me like the lovely people at Mitre 10 do without complaint.

I choose a side that I’ll paint on and give that side a few coats of gesso, sanding in-between coats. I like to pay particular attention to the edges, do I want them dark or light? Do I want lumps of paint making textured edges that I can sand back revealing the layers underneath? Do I want to make them an entirely different colour?

Sometimes I get a theme going and sometimes I’m more random as I do the prep. There’s already continuity in the size and shape, so I can rely on that if I want to team them up later for a group shot.

edges…

I like my edges to tell the story of the progress - when you can see the layers you can literally see time spent on prep which is why it looks a bit aged I guess. To me it looks interesting and rustic, especially when I use up bits of leftover paint - I can recall “that bit of paint was left over from that painting session…” Like a diary of painting time.

…several hours later…

I finished painting a portrait of Flynn for his birthday on that board that I under-painted with the two tones of grey (pictured above). I gave it to him last night and he seemed rather pleased :)

The Dark Side...

A few weeks ago Carrie asked me if I could write something about painting shadows.

I thought about it for a while - “what can I write about shadows that’s interesting and helpful and would condense into this blog space?”

As an idea started to form I primed some pages in my sketchbooks with white gesso.

Warm shadows.

It’s not uncommon to think of shadows when painting them as cooler kinds of colours than the parts that aren’t in the shadows - so when using colours in painting we might add black to the colour being used to make an illusion of a shadow, but even though black works it can easily end up looking dirty and dull, especially with skin tones.

-

…a few days later I’m ready to put my blog idea into practice… but first I need to clean up from a bit of abstract experimentation .

expressive abstract is so much fun and gives an opportunity to explore different aspects of the painting process without an end in mind, and it reveals a little bit about the inner workings of one’s mind too, I think.

Shadows:

My idea is to paint shadows of the same subject in different temperatures to compare them. I’m going to paint some noses and ears, using oils, with viridian green in my pallet because I’ve been meaning to play around with that again since my last exploration. I also bought myself a glass pallet so I want to use that for the first time too.

warm pallet

with Viridian green being the coolest colour on my pallet, and the warm Cad red medium as my red the pallet is warm, so my shadows are going to be warm. The coolest colours I can get are the high key greys and the very dark combo of mostly green and a touch of red, so my mid tones are all warm with the highest and lowest tones the coolest.

note: my glass pallet is awesome, I can scrape of the paint, even when dried with a glass scraping blade. Amazing!!

study 1.

This limited pallet works quite nicely for these reddish skin shadows in the ears I think, and the light pink tones would probably work for a nose - I’ll try that next.

Study 2.

Trying to be cooler in the shadows of this nose using the same pallet without gong too dark means I need to make soft greys rather than strong greens, browns or reds - so putting a little green into the light pink gives me a coolish grey shadow that’s not too dark.

now I’m going to try blue instead of green in my pallet to see what the cooler colour does to it.

study 3.

changing Viridian green for Ultramarine blue allows me to get more purple(ish) shadows than the warm shadows that green makes they are still warm shadows though, and where it gets cooler it gets greyer not necessarily darker.

It’s not a huge difference in temperature - both pallets make warm shadows which work with skin.

To get subtle tones in the shadow side it’s more about temperature than tone, so the tone is a similar key but the temperature (colour, more grey for cool and more red for warm) adds depth to the shadows.

So now I’m wondering if I need to cool my red down (Cad red mid is a very warm red) to see what happens to my shadows with a cooler red on the pallet.

What I will note though is that I’m not using black paint to make shadows, I’m using the three primaries and white to get the variations in tone and temperature, and some of these tones are very subtle.

adding a cool red, Alizarin Crimson, to my pallet I seemed to have warmed the whole thing up even more - this might be because I started with a reddish underpainting.

I really like the warm shadows - in-fact the warmer I go the more I like it.

For a little bit more I record the process of the Alizarin portrait, I hope it helps.

I registered myself to take part in...

the 2022 Incognito Art Show.

A few days later I got a package that contained 3 A5 sized cards and some instructions.

“The identity of each artist will be anonymous when the artwork is exhibited. Only once purchased will the artist’s identity be revealed on the reverse side of the work.”

Who is it for?

“In 2021, the incognito art show donated $70000 to Studio A, an arts company that provides professional development for artists with intellectual disabilities.” see here

They want to do the same this year. I figured that is a good cause and a fun little project, so I under-painted the 3 cards with coloured gesso in preparation to contribute.

(I then had to iron the back of the cards and while they were still warm pressed them between two wooden boards because they curled a bit with the paint. ) This means that I have to tape the cards firmly down while I paint them.

what next?

feeling pretty random at 6:15 in the morning I’m thinking a bit of fruit, or a glass bottle…

I do realise as I’m writing this that I’m not being as anonymous as I maybe I should be but…it’s a big world out there and I have a small audience so I figure it’s a “two birds” kind of thing.

“Save some, spend some and give some away.”

I can’t remember where I first heard it but that’s a philosophy for money that I learnt when I was really young and I apply it to my time as well - “time is money’ according to "Advice to a Young Tradesman", an essay by Benjamin Franklin, and in a way I see myself as a kind of tradesman because I work with my hands building things ( I kind of build a painting with layers and layers of paint, and I sometimes build my own supports to paint on).

“Save some, spend some and give some away” if applied to my work is to sell some, to keep some and to give some away - is also kind of applies to what I paint - I paint some commissions (other peoples’ ideas), or ideas that I will share in a workshop/class. I paint some ideas that interest me just for me without intention of selling or using in any way (like studies in my sketchbook, or of my children and friends and for gifts), and I paint some things specifically for putting out there for sale and/or exhibiting or entering into art prizes.

-

Settling on a piece of fruit that I’ve painted before and a limited pallet that I’m familiar with, I make myself a hot cup of tea and prepare to make a start…wondering if I should put the timer on…wondering if I should put on some music or a podcast…wondering why I make things more complicated than they actually are…wondering if I should delete that last bit…

40 minutes…

including procrastination. Now I’m thinking about the next - animal…some kind of bird maybe?

So now I must choose an image, wash my brushes and pallet and choose a new pallet, make some more tea…maybe feed the chickens and put on a load of washing…decide what to listen to (or turn off the white noise and listen to the birds and occasional car going by),

and that makes 3…

now I will just let them sit and cure for a day or two so they don’t curl when I un-stick them from the boards, pop them in the supplied packaging and send them on their merry way.

…and post this blog.

It's been a busy week...

…and I spent a good chunk of my creative time writing a eulogy for my dear Aunty Pat. I put my heart and soul into it so I thought I’d share and archive it here in my weekly blog.

…and share a page of my sketchbook…

Pat Walsh. 13/9/1939 - 23/4/2022

Pat Walsh

Fondly remembered as Aunty Pat and Great Aunty Pat to my kids, nieces and nephews - loved every blade of grass and every tree, she loved the sea and the sky and all of nature, she kept her birdbath full and let her hammock be a refuge for the geckos in her own back yard because she believed that love for the whole world starts in your own back yard.

The earliest memories that I have of Aunty Pat are in the Mercedes college convent kitchen, she’s wearing her nun’s habit and we were getting the grand tour of the wonderful old place. I felt proud to have this privilege

Years later I remember camping out past Port Augusta, way out in the middle of nowhere and there we visited aunty Pat where she lived and ran little school for aboriginal people. 

Later still I remember mum getting letters from exotic places which contained photos of Aunty Pat sitting among the palm trees, or perched upon the steps of some foreign looking building, with hand-written letters attached about the good work she was doing there. 

God’s work.

After 20 years of being a nun she left the convent and that’s when we started seeing alot more of Aunty Pat.

She moved into a tiny flat by the beach. She loved the beach. I remember a tiny little kitchen at least 1 flight of stairs up, spotlessly clean with white walls, a suspended cupboard with glass sliding doors that was filled with familiar things, and Aunty Pat in blue jeans.

Years later, sometime in the early 2000s, Aunty Pat started writing her memoirs. She talked about it for a long time before she actually wrote it. I remember her talking about writing her memoirs when she took up art classes at Tafe, here we pondered the processes of her drawing and printmaking efforts as her portfolio grew and was looking pretty good, and we would chat about creative projects that could be turned into business endeavours that she would start, and maybe we could work on together after she’d written her memoirs.

She talked about writing her memoirs when she learnt the fine art of holistic massage, and set up a little remedial massage business in her spare room. 

She was talking about it when she put her car on the ferry to Tasmania (she had a fear of flying), she stayed there for ages, so long that Mum took Nanna on a plane to visit her over there.

 And she was talking about writing her memoirs when she decided to travel around the world by boat. I still can’t believe she did that. Maybe it was on that shipping container where she rented a tiny cabin for the journey back that she actually had some spare time to write her memoirs. 

However she managed it it was not long after that journey that she threw a party, and out of the large box that was plonked on the floor of the her cozy Glengowrie kitchen, presented us all with a green novel sized book that had a photo of her hugging a tree on the front cover and the words - “you never know what comes to you.”- finally her memoirs were finished and published and we all got a copy with some to spare.

So now I will tell you a little bit of it in Aunty Pats own words as she saw it and wrote it in her memoirs.

(note: below I’ve taken excerpts from her memoirs and stitched them together to tell a little bit of her story in her own words.)

-

1939 - My arrival was somewhat mysterious. I came behind a thin membrane, a veil - a caul was covering my face. Cauls are said to be great good luck, a lifeguard against tempests and torrents They claim those born with a caul will never drown. And I haven’t.

That caul was to be the forerunner of other veils and enclosures to follow in my life.

-
My best birthday present arrived the day mum wheeled a ladies two wheeler bike down our passage - my ticket to freedom had landed and I was off too see the country - Gepps cross! Here the plains began and I saw funny half-tank like shaped buildings sprouting up. Dad told me these were the homes for new Australians. 

-
It was the early 1950s when dad built our red brick beach house - perched on a hill in second avenue Moana. Mum proudly named it St Michael’s. 

On the back of our large Moana block dad made a tennis court that gave us lots of room to play. More important than this play area was an even bigger play area that was walking distance from our house - Moana Beach.

Looking back today I cherish the opportunities we had at Moana to roam freely in natures art galleries. Our parents trusted we’d be safe, put a few restraints on us and off we’d go each morning. Our first port of call was Moana Kiosk, (still standing today). Here two shillings bought us two hours of riding the waves on a rubber surf shooter.

-
Back home on Azalea street Prospect, life reverted to our predictable meat and 2 veg routine.

Roasts on Sundays, 

sausages and mashed potatoes on Monday

Crumbed Chops on Tuesday

Tripe with parsley sauce or lambs fry with bacon on Wednesday

Stew or steak and kidney pie on Thursday

Friday was fish and chips or that glaring orange English filet.

Saturday was a make-do day with soup and pasties when the footie was on, and cold camp pie, cooked corn beef, brawn or fritz and salads when the cricket was on. 

-
Going to the walls…

Today I look back. Entering convent life was like I’d divorced my family and life beyond the convent walls. I didn’t have access to a phone, visiting days was once a month and it was as though I was now living in an overseas community.

In spite of this separation I enjoyed the novelty of my new life. 

The novice mistress outlines the daily routine:

“The bell to rise will be at 5:25am and you are to be in the chapel at 5:50am for chanting (in latin).

After this there will be 30 minutes of meditation.

A short break then it was back to our stalls for mass in Latin at 7am.

Mass over in silence we filed to breakfast down a narrow corridor connecting the chapel and cloister to the former Barr Smith house.

Breakfast was taken in silence except on first class days, these were Holy days of obligation, like Christmas and Easter Sunday.

On second class days speaking was permitted from midday. On other days lunch was taken in silence.

Silence was a big part of convent life.

-

It’s now 1972 and I’m back with the trees at Mercedes college, assigned to teach grade four.

I’d already learned about teaching through teaching music for 10 years and now I was to learn about learning.

This Transformative experience was due to a wonderful teacher named Joan McKie.

Joan arrived with firm beliefs about learning and created a stimulating environment where children were free to learn. Under her inspiration the lower primary school was named Murakunji - an aboriginal word said to mean “many little whirlwinds often seen in large numbers”.

Under her creative plan children chose their own area of learning - sometimes they spent all morning, or all day or all week doing their chosen area of learning.

This child directed learning, with support from teachers, astounded me. All around I saw children productive and creative. They were self motivated, engrossed and stimulated with what they were doing.

-

I was doing aboriginal studies as part of my Batchelor of education, and one day finishing an assignment an idea of working with aboriginal children surfaced.

A few weeks later I was summoned to the principal’s office for a long distance call.

Lifting the receiver a deep voice boomed.

“Harold here. Would you be prepared to do a creative activities program with Aboriginal students at Davenport reserve in January?”

I’d heard Port Augusta was a pretty rough place and I wondered what an aboriginal reserve would be like.

-
Our accommodation on our first visit was in one of the white staff houses run by the department of community welfare. This staff house was a refuge after the draining heat when doing art with a bunch of enthusiastic aboriginal children. These kids were not fazed by the heat and came around peering through our window at 7:30am ready for more art. 

-
later in 1974 - my superiors decided to fund two positions at Davenport.

This time Sr Joan and I were to pioneer a new course for adults on Davenport reserve commencing 1975.

I was 35 and full-time work with aboriginal people had called and found me. 

Our classroom to be was bare and without air-conditioning. Our flat had an air conditioner however, and a lounge/kitchen area, bathroom, laundry and one bedroom. Joan and I shared the bedroom. This sleeping arrangement was a hurdle for me as since entering the convent eighteen years earlier I’d always had a cell to myself. This I now realised had been a luxury and now I needed a large chunk of adapting.

Suddenly I was confronted by an aboriginal woman:

“are you government?”

“no” I replied

“are you welfare”

“no” I repeated

she then shouted:

“I WANT A DIVORCE!”

Laughing I bleated out “I’m a teacher.”

Thinking back to those early days at Davernport I’m reminded of a day when I was sitting in the middle of the back seat of a car full of Aboriginal students. For some unknown reason, while we drove along I suddenly blurted out “I’m the only white fella here.”

This resulted in a laughing woman student who was besides me, patting me on the arm saying, “Don’t worry Bub - you’re black on the inside.”

My time at Davenport Pt Augusta was a high point in my life. 

It was a time when barriers began to be pulled down and pushed away. 

A time when the thoughts, ideas and energies of many people came together to create a unique Aboriginal community development program that showed new things were possible. It was a pivotal time in my life. 

-

Today it’s ten years since my leukaemia scare and I’m well. 

My time of chapels, churches and classrooms has long gone. Most days now I walk along Glenelg beach close to the sea’s edge as I admire nature’s wonders of the sea, sky and sand and man’s inventions as I see planes come and go from Adelaide Airport. I haven’t  been on a flight for a couple of years - but what I have done is fulfil a dream to go around the world without one flight!! 

…

Yes Aunty Pat did that in 2008, visiting every continent on the way - according to her it was quite an adventure she took a cruise ship from Fremantle through the Suez Canal to Europe - a bus tour of Spain, Portugal and Morocco. And even got a police escort at the port of Dunkirk to board a freighter bound for Australia via the panama canal.

…I can’t believe she did that, and what’s even more astounding is that she did it all by herself. 

I’ll finish now with the quote found at the start of her memoirs by Margaret Mead. I love this quote and I believe Aunty Pat aspired to be the person this is about:

“If one doesn’t love one part of the earth and every tree and blade of grass on it, how are you going to love the whole world?

You know the planet isn’t very loveable all by itself. 

But if you work up from your neighbourhood and the hills and the trees that you love and your own children and your own religious beliefs and you own language, you can end up loving the whole world.”

I got myself some acrylic paint pens...

…last year and haven’t used them much… well I’ve been using them to write on the back of paintings, and I’ve used them in 3 or 4 studies so far, but only tentatively.

I didn’t want to get too many pens incase I didn’t like them so I bought myself a few pastel colours and white. I figured that I could use normal texta markers, like sharpies, if I wanted to go dark because they do draw over paint, but light coloured textas are transparent and don’t work well over other colours and you can’t actually get white textas or opaque pastels textas. You can get white gel pens though which draw over dark colours, but they are pens with a very fine tip, and they work great over watercolour.

The best thing to do when you get some new materials is to use them - have a play and make a mess with them, learn through trial and error. It’s a bit of a paradox really because once you get them out and the excitement dwindles after a the first try followed by disappointment (nothing works like you think it’s suppose to the first time), and then after the first few tries you don’t want to waste them on just any old mess when you don’t know how to use them masterfully, so they end up sitting there in the kit looking important… and very new.

that was also my experience with the watercolours I bought myself about a year ago - a nice little kit and it’s looking very new…still…

My first instinct is to draw with the paint pens, so I start the the painting with a messy drawing using the pens.

A few days later…

…as things would have it, being school holidays and all, I’m away in the country on holiday, so I can’t finish the paint pen bat or blog in time for my weekly post…unless…

…introducing my mostly unused watercolour kit…

I packed a light kit for watercolour en plein air, (I bought it for this very reason a year or so ago) and I tried outdoor painting in watercolour for the first time today. When I bought the supplies a year ago I bought a tiny little, good quality watercolour journal which is so lovely I was not ready to use it for just any old mess, so the next day I got for myself a cheap little journal from office works which I’ve about half filled by now.

I tried to condense my kit as much as possible for outdoor painting, so I can just stop and sketch without too much fussing around.

My first attempts at watercolour in my budget office works journal.

Viridian green...

…is a colour I’ve had in my oil kit from the very beginning, but it’s not a colour that I’ve used much and it’s certainly not a colour that I would normally add to my skin tone pallet…however, I’ve noticed that other artists that I admire do include Viridian green into their complex skin pallets (by complex I mean more than 4 colours + white), and so I think it’s about time that I tried it for myself.

so…

I set out the complex pallet that I said I would try in a previous blog and painted an alla prima portrait right off the bat. I was pleasantly surprised at the addition of viridian green, and I’m itching to use it again.

colours used for this oil painting study are, Viridian green, Ultramarine blue, Cerulean blue, transparent red oxide, Cad red, Cad red deep, Alizarin crimson, yellow ochre, titanium white and ivory black.

note: if you want to watch the process on youtube see here

The trick to using Viridian green in skin tones is to mix it with the reds to get skin colours, so instead of adding blue or black and yellow, you use the green as the main mixing colour into the reds, and then tweak it with the other colours, not the other way around. It’s just works so nicely, like it’s the perfect mix of blue and yellow for this job I think.

I put out so much paint…

…on my pallet there’s enough left to do another portrait, so I’m going to try something else that I’m not really comfortable doing - finishing a portrait that I started in acrylics with oils, and I’m going to use this complex pallet.

I painted this acrylic study…

…earlier this year. I used a limited pallet, 3 colours + white and left it looking unfinished.

It has now been transformed with the oils, and although the process was frustrating (like I prefer to start in oils if I’m going to use them), I’m happy with the results (see below).

oil study over acrylic underpainting using the complex pallet with viridian green.

I have one more idea to try before I close this blog…a limited pallet using viridian green, red and white. I’m dubious that I’ll pull this off without adding yellow ochre to my pallet but we will see…

with the addition of yellow ochre, viridian green and red + white make a workable skin pallet.

well…after these studies I am moving viridian green from the pile of paint that I don’t bother with to my pile of necessary colours and favourites.

Fancy that!

Zinc White...

is a transparent white, which is kind of weird because white is not a colour normally used like other transparent colours are used….technically white is not a colour and is used to tint other colours when mixed with them. Zinc white has one tenth of the tinting strength that titanium white does.

so how should it be used…

…time for a bit of play, and as i’m writing this I’m thinking of a way in which I can experiment with zinc white.

My first experiment was a bit of a fail - trying to use zinc white like I normally would use white, mixing it with three primary colours to paint an eye - I ended up getting frustrated and having to add white gesso to add enough strength to the paint for the light tones because the zinc white is so subtle that it’s almost like using a water colour. (there is no watercolour white paint, btw, as the white paint that you get in watercolour sets is actually paint not watercolour. I gave up before I finished.

Then I thought I’d compare zinc with titanium as mixes and on a dark ground.

zinc study 1

the way I paint, zinc white is too transparent to be the only white to use on skin. The thin nature of the zinc pigment is more obvious when painted over another colour.

zinc study 2

comparing zinc with titanium white, mixing them both with red and then seeing how it looks on a dark ground

now I need to think of another experiment…

….also I’m writing this blog as I try the experiments, which is an experiment in itself too :) I feel like a bit of a scientist.

I’ll try it on a bit of fruit…and maybe another eye…

Zinc study 3

It feels moody on a dark background (or is that me ‘cause I’m struggling). A softer brush lays the paint down better than a corse one. It works nicely with layers - light over light to bring it up to lighter tones. I like how you can see the light layers which you normally don’t when using opaque paint unless you add medium. It’s kind of like using a tinted medium really. None of this is really surprising except that it’s white doing these things - like it’s just not how I’ve ever used white before but I see the potential…

Just from these little experiments I understand zinc white alot better. It will be useful when I want gentle shifts of tone at the end stages of an acrylic painting rather than battling with getting the colour match using titanium, or thinning it with lots of medium. It would also be good for opening up dark colours like blue without obviously tinting them, I think.

Zinc study 4

Here I'm comparing the tinting strength of titanium white to zinc white in midnight blue paint. I really notice a lovely effect happening around the mid tones, the zinc makes a cleaner colour that doesn’t look as pastel as it would when adding titanium white, and it’s so much easier to make subtle changes of tone.

The best thing I can do to really get a feel for it and see if I like it is to simply put it on my pallet along with titanium when I’m painting and see how I go, and if I do this for a few months it may become a necessary part of my painting process. We shall see.

note: all experiments were done in acrylic paint.