Page 13 - Artist Materials Advisor

In his book, Les Elémens de Peinture pratique, Roger de Piles describes a typical flesh tone palette of the 17th century. On this palette is a dark yellow color, stil de grain, a lake pigment made with unripe buckthorn berries.

A paper by scientists at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute exposes long-term problems with zinc white in oil paint. The report “The Chemical and Mechanical Effects of Pigments on Drying Oils” describes the highlights of a 28-year study on the stability and strength of oil paint films. The results reveal important implications for artwork made with artists’ oil paints containing zinc white.

Canvas has become the most common support for oil painting, replacing wooden panels. One of the earliest surviving oil paintings on canvas is the French Virgin and Child with Angels from around 1410 in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. However, panel painting remained in everyday use until the sixteenth century in Italy and the seventeenth century in Northern Europe. Mantegna and Venetian artists were among those leading the change. Religious differences and guild practice, as well as the availability of supports—good quality wood in Northern Europe and a flourishing flax growing and weaving tradition in Southern Europe—likely influenced the preference and adoption of supports. As materials and paintings were imported and exported and artists traveled to Italy, the influence of Italian techniques filtered north.

How Fred Wessel uses Rublev Colours, Aqueous Pigment Dispersions made by Natural Pigments, and dry pigment powders in his tempera paintings. The dispersions eliminate the step of dispersing pigments in water, allowing him to spend more time at the easel and less with the muller and grinding surface.

At one time in history, the English word pink referred to a yellow color. There is no satisfactory explanation for why the word pink meant a yellow color. There is speculation, owing to its greenish-yellow tone, that it is derived from the German word pinkeln, translated in a dictionary of 1798 as ‘to piss, to make water.’ The color most often known as Dutch pink was ‘a yellow lake prepared from Persian berries or quercitron and used chiefly as an artist’s pigment,’ according to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, under the definition of Dutch pink.

Learning from artists' manuscripts, a contemporary artist adapts a 15th-century recipe for preparing grounds for oil painting on wood panels. In her book, The Art of Arts, Anita Albus discusses materials and practices of oil and tempera painting that have either been lost or fallen into disuse. Albus makes a poignant observation that ever since the industrial revolution, it has been an industry that dictates what materials are available to artists. Gesso production falls into this category alongside the preparation of paints and mediums. Artists have succumbed to the materials handed to us. She reminds us that before industrialization and typical of the European artist's guilds of the 15th and 16th centuries, it was largely the artists who prepared their own formulas and concoctions in painting.

Asphaltum and bitumen are broad terms for many substances based on high-molecular hydrocarbons. From the viewpoint of current art historical research, bitumen represents a large group of organic substances, which consist of an indefinable mixture of high-molecular hydrocarbons. Bitumen either occurs naturally or is obtained from the synthetic distillation of petroleum. Depending upon its place of origin or technique of manufacturing, bitumen possesses a composition of different characteristics.

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.