Auxiliary materials for oil painting:
solvents, brushes and palette

How to dilute oil paints, what brushes are needed for painting with oil paints and what should the palette look like? Every aspiring artist asks these questions. Let’s try to answer them.

Solvents for oil paints

How to dilute oil paints and do you need to be guided by some rules for applying paints to the canvas?

You can paint with oil paints as they are prepared in tubes, without adding anything to them. It is better not to add oils to the finished paint. Oil, however bleached, turns yellow when it dries, and excess oil in paints darkens the entire painting and can cause wrinkling and cracking. If the painter wants to make the paint more liquid, it is better to dilute it with some volatile liquid, which, having played its role as a thinner, will evaporate.

You can use refined oil (petrol) as a thinner, evaporating without residue, or varnishes for painting specially prepared for diluting paints, which should not be mixed with "retouching varnish" and "picture varnish", the purpose of which is different. Lacquer "retouch" is used to wipe withered pictures and generally a dried layer of paint before re-painting. "Painting varnish" is used to cover a finished painting that has stood for at least a year. Novice artists can sometimes also use refined kerosene.

Do not use liquids that say "copal varnish", "dammar varnish", "mastic varnish" without specifying for what use these varnishes are intended. The designations "kopalovy", "dammarovy", etc. speak about the source material of these varnishes, without indicating their purpose.

If the artist is unable to purchase either petrol or varnish for painting, and is forced to resort to kerosene, the latter must at least be filtered through a layer of cotton wool, on which some of the harmful impurities will remain.

What brushes are needed for oil painting?

Oil paint is painted almost exclusively with pig bristle brushes. More often flat brushes are used - spatulas with relatively short or longer hair.

The brush should be resilient and elastic, and the ends of the bristles should be natural, pointed and not cut in any way, otherwise the brush will scratch and lay the paint in grooves.

The bristles should lie parallel and not bristle in different directions.

Less commonly used in oil painting with brushes and soft hair. It is impossible to take thick paint from the palette with a very soft brush. Of the soft brushes, the best are kolinsky, made from the hair of an animal, that is, a red marten. These brushes are suitable for oil and watercolor painting. A wet kolinsky brush should have one perfectly sharp end. These brushes are indispensable when a painter needs to draw a very thin line with a brush or finish a very small detail.

Brushes must be kept extremely clean. There are many different products available for cleaning brushes. But the best is the easiest way to wash brushes in thick soap suds, after which the soap is washed clean with water. Hot water should be avoided, as it can dissolve the glue with which the brush is glued at the base, and the brush may come out.

Palette

Paints are placed on the palette before work.

A palette for oil paints is made either from a whole piece of some light wood (for example, pear or walnut), or from plywood. Before using it, the palette must be thoroughly impregnated with oil so that the oil from the paints applied to the palette is not absorbed into the palette. The shape of the palette is different.

The palette, which fits in a special sketch box, is usually made quadrangular. In order for the palette to lie well on the hand, not to tire it, the right edge of the palette is left thicker, while the left and top are cut very thinly. In addition, a lead plate is sometimes inserted into the lower right edge of the palette for counterweight.

Paints are placed on the palette in small piles (the size of a pea or a nut, depending on the size of the work) on the top edge, leaving as much room as possible for mixing. Paints must be placed in a certain order in order to remember where which paint lies, and take it with a brush, even without looking at the palette.

The palette, like the brushes, must be kept very clean. At the end of the work, unused piles of clean paints are left on the edge of the palette for the next day of work. Nevertheless, the mixtures are removed from the surface of the palette, and the palette is wiped clean and dry with a piece of cotton wool or a rag. You cannot wash the palette with turpentine, which dissolves the oil soaking the palette and spoils its mirror surface.

There are also special tools for cleaning the palette: putters and mastekhin. The former are made of horn, the latter are made of very flexible and resilient steel.

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