OIL PAINTING MEDIUMS - How to use them + how to make your own!

Hi Andrew, welcome to another

painting

video and in this video we're going to talk all about

painting

mediums

. If you're new to oil painting or new to my channel, you may be wondering what a medium is and why I should do it. you use it right, media are simply substances that we add to our oil paints to change their properties in some way. Let's say we are squeezing paint out of the tube and it was a little stiff and difficult to work with, we might want to break it. tension, so one medium can help improve flow, making it easier to apply the brush to the canvas, other

mediums

can help add body to the paint for a thicker impasto application and sometimes a medium can even change the drawing time either by having a very fast drying. time or extend the drawing time so that the surface is open and we can mix that over several days, but before we start using any of these mediums, let's have a quick chat about some basic rules and some principles that we're going to apply. we must comply with to ensure our success in the study, let's go to the board now, you have no doubt heard of these principles before, but let's cover

them

once again first of all, we have the number one fat line principle when we are using means and we want Comply with this as much as possible because if we don't, it could lead to disasters in the future.

What does this mean? It means that we start our painting with a very lean layer and then we start layering over this with greasier mediums incorporating more oils and greasy substances into that paint film, but some of the other principles we want to stick to are working thick over fine, also work flexible on rigid or flexible on less flexible and finally work slow. draw over quick draw now there are some mistakes you can

make

when using mediums and the first most common mistake is not observing these principles one through four the second mistake is simply using too much medium.

I try to keep it in a ratio of no more. Instead of a medium of one part to three parts paint, I now sometimes break this rule a little bit, but that's because I'm very familiar with the substances I use for the most part, but if I'm not sure, I always just Make sure you only use one half or three parts paint, so avoid using too much of that medium. The number three mistake that people usually

make

is being impatient and not allowing the mediums to do their thing before continuing with the painting, sometimes the mediums can take a while. too long to dry, this is particularly true if you are using a lot of base oil, for example, and the fourth most common mistake is using different types of media within the painting.

Again, I break this rule from time to time, but generally as a rule, I try to stick to a particular type of medium while finishing that painting, otherwise things can get out of control and can lead to problems in the future, as well. So let's draw a quick little diagram on this board talking about these principles and the common mistakes we make when it comes to media now if we were to look at principles one through four, we would have our canvas substrate right here with a nice layer of primer on top and then we want to start building the layers of the When painting, we're going to start with a really nice lean layer following the principle of grease over a single layer.

This would be my block so that the lean coat has a little more solvent and a little less oil content or a really nice lean coat and painting medium on top of that, I would start to fatten up the paint layers and having a little more medium and a little more oil on the next layer, this would be my modeling and then on top of the modeling I would apply a third. The layer may not be as thick, but that would be my detail and maybe a little bit of glaze and, again, it would be a little bit thicker than the one underneath, always attached to that grease on the surface, but here we are also observing the thick over the thin, as well as the flexible. on rigid and this slow draw over the faster draw, if I stick to those principles then overall I should avoid problems in the future.

What happens if we don't follow those principles and get a little out of control by not observing

them

? is what can happen again, let's have our canvas substrate here with a good coat of primer and let's say we want to start from the beginning with a slow drawing, a heavy, really sticky impasto texture, and here we have a nice thick coat of suspended painting. pigment and a lot of oily medium and then once we're happy with our image, let's say it's a portrait, we want to do some glazing effects with a quick drying medium on top, it's nice and thin, now try to imagine this layer slow drawing. that we placed initially continues to warp and move and do its thing for several months, it could even be years, it continues to move and move and we have sealed it with a very thin layer of rapid drawing medium, what happens to this layer?

It cracks and leads to an absolute disaster that destroys our paint, so we must adhere to these principles at all times and do everything possible to avoid those mistakes. Now let's talk about alkyd resins and one of my favorites is this one made by Windsor Newton liquid and in fact, Windsor Newton makes many different mediums within the liquid range and they all do something slightly different. I'll just say up front that Windsor Newton is not a sponsor. I will just give you my honest review of this product and I have had over 10 years of experience working with this and have had very good results.

What exactly is an alkyl resin? Well, an alkyd is simply a thermoplastic polyester resin which is the combination of an alcohol and a fatty acid. so, alkyd, when you put those two terms together, now there are all kinds of really interesting things, the complicated chemistry that goes into making these things. I failed chemistry in high school. I don't have much of a brain for it, but I know this stuff really works and I've had great results with it so far. There are a few reasons why I use liquid and the range of liquids. The first is because it is really convenient.

It dries super fast sometimes with normal oil painting mediums or something with a lot of support. oil on it we can be waiting from days to weeks for our surface to dry, but here, when I mix a little liquid in there, it dries overnight forming a permanently flexible layer. Now I want that flexibility because I'm often in a rush to finish my paintings and give them to the client and I'm rolling my canvases so the physical stress that I'm putting on the surface of the painting could cause cracking if I wasn't using a product like this.

I also enjoy it a lot. the consistency of the liquid creates a really nice flow when I mix it with my paints and again each one of them does something slightly different but the main medium I use is this original liquid, this stuff right here is the workhorse behind many of my paintings. I decant it into this skull bottle because it makes me feel like a badass in the studio. How cool are these. Now let's play with some of this medium and get it out onto the palette. I'm going to have some. of this titanium blank here and we're going to mix some original liquid right into that blank, just scoop out a little bit again.

I'm careful not to use too much medium so that I don't end up with more than I need to use. Now you will notice it straight from the tube, the titanium white is very rigid and difficult to brush. We would find it difficult to cover a canvas with this type of paint unless we did something to break the surface tension, so I use just a touch. of that original liquid and it immediately starts to slide on that paddle and I broke the surface tension and it becomes much easier to brush. I would use a consistency like this maybe it came out too liquid but I used this type of consistency to block it and again this will dry overnight now if I want to strengthen the body of the paint and then I will use this product called liquid impasto it has similar components to the original liquid, although not One is really sure what exactly is here, but this again is an alkyl resin that will form that permanent flexible layer, but this time it will be added to the body of the paint and will hold our brushstroke, so if I take out a little bit of this titanium white now. and a little bit of this liquid and paste also helps improve the flow a little bit, but all those really nice peaks and valleys stay in that pile of paint and you can imagine that would retain a lot of my brush stroke, beautiful stuff now that these two products They are light.

The fine details in gel and liquid are also very good. I don't have as much experience using them as I do with original liquid and liquid and paste, so I will post a future video on these because I am incorporating these mediums. in my latest Milford Sound landscape that you see right behind me, but these again have similar components to the original liquid and impasto liquid, but have slightly different characteristics. The light gel will help us with some glazing effects and that fine detail as the name suggests will help with the detail layers and provide a really nice fine brushstroke, so again, I'll have a video on these two specifically very soon, now the liquid It's not without its drawbacks, one of the biggest being the smelly fumes this gives off while working with it, it's best to use it in a well-ventilated studio space or a nice open area if you can work in one.

I really enjoy using liquid when I'm working outside, for example, because I just don't notice the fumes at all because I'm painting outside, but those fumes can be a little irritating and can cause an allergic reaction in some people, so use this with a little caution, the other drawback of using these means. It's just that for some people they dry a little too quickly for me I need that comfort in that quick dry time to be able to keep going, but maybe these aren't

your

thing if you're looking for a more extended drawing time and an open surface on which you can continue mixing now another criticism i see throwing liquid online is that there are people who are really concerned about the yellowing.

I too was worried about this for many years so I decided to do my own testing, let me share. with you guys, those results right now, this test is two years old, which is about five minutes in terms of the longevity of the paints, it's actually not a lot of time, but in those two years I was able to see quite a bit about how it works. The liquid behaves now, what are we going through here? These two columns move down, our original liquid and the liquid filling. I'll tell you about these mediums in just a second, but down here on this side I have my paint to medium ratio here at the top I have one part paint to one part medium and then I gradually increase that medium one part to the time as I go down this test.

Now what I can see here is that it is right at the top in a one to one ratio, the original liquid has not turned yellowish to any detectable amount now again, this is much more than I would spread that medium anyway , I wouldn't even use it as a glaze, it's too diluted here, you can see the same thing with the one to one liquid impasto, there is no detectable yellowing as we get to the bottom, with one part paint and eight parts medium , here it started to turn a little yellow now again, that's why it goes over anything I would consider doing it with liquid that I wouldn't use as much in just a little bit of paint, but this gives me peace of mind knowing that the liquid won't turn yellowish in a dramatic amount when properly mixed with

your

oil paints now again by glazing applications.

I'm going to bring you a new video very soon using that liquid light gel and liquid fine details now on this side with these really yellow mediums over here, you might be a little scared by what's going on there. It was a product I used until recently and I was again abusing it by not using it the way it was designed because I was simply curious to see how it would behave if I spread it too thin and just mixed a little bit of paint with that medium. It was a gel-bodied oil that was mixed with the oil paints and as it spread, you can see here that the drier component caused it to turn quite yellow again.

I don't use this product anymore, but I was just curious to see it. How a simple test like this went will tell you a lot, but now I can continue using liquids with confidence in the end result. Now that we've had a quick chat here about alkyd resin. I'm going to go to my local art store. a few more media and we will continue our conversation, so it's just a short trip to my local art store. I head south on Dark Supplies. It's about two hours from where I live. I don't care, it's nice. country leads lots of inspiring things to see had all kinds of ideas for new clients gay weddings be there shortly and pick up more materials now let me take a minute and tell youabout this video sponsor Skillshare schoo shirt is an online learning community for creators with over 25k classes in art, design, business, digital media and more.

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I took a class from Gabriel Brinke and picked up some new skills there as well and it's amazing what digital art can add to your compositions. It's so fast, so effective and helps you take your compositions a little further. Now Skillshare is also super affordable with annual subscriptions costing less than ten dollars a month, so join over 7 million creators learning with Skill Share, click the link in the description below and get a free trial of two months now again. I will work with sponsors if it's a product I actually use, if they have a really good deal and it will really help my art, so be sure to click the link in the description below and a big THANK YOU to Skillshare for sponsoring this video now.

We still have a little ways to go, a lot of distance to go before we reach the local art store. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some new materials, so I'm finally here in Invercargill. Let's go to that art store now. I don't know about you, but art stores are pretty dangerous for me because I always end up leaving the store with ten or twelve things that weren't on my list. I can't help but buy art supplies that we are going to choose. Let's grab some solvents and some mediums and see what we can do to mix them in the studio, so let's check it out.

I've been using quite a bit of this fluid originally for refilling, but I want to try something different. mediums, so I'm going to get some solvent and some oils like we've been talking about and see if we can also make our own discs for almost 500 dollars later. I didn't mean to do that, but I have all kinds of stuff here for The game was back in the studio, let's go now. It's a great little visit to the art store and I was able to stock up on the liquor I needed, but I also wanted to get some other materials I used to use in the past. before I started using liquid right at the beginning of my professional art career and here I have a group of mediums that are made by artistic spectrum and they are made in a sequence and it's almost a painting system in itself, we have a number one medium, number two and number three and you use these mediums in that sequence, so here this is medium number one and this is what they call a lean painting medium.

You have two main ingredients here, a solvent which is pure artists' gum turpentine and a The oil is usually base oil and I'm going to explain a little bit more about oral interpretation standing up in a little bit more in this video, but here are the two main ingredients of this medium and work with the principle of fat into lean this is going to be much leaner and as we go in sequence it becomes fatter and fatter so here medium number two will have more oil content than that pure turpentine gum, so there will be a lot more fat, so to speak, here and then even more in medium number three now again, these are very simple mediums, here it is mainly turpentine and an oil base, but there are some other ingredients.

Manufacturers generally keep the components of their media secret. I wish I knew exactly what's here, but I think I just want to keep it a trade secret so other companies don't come out and copy them, but for the most part this is a great product and I enjoyed using it when I first started. You'll notice here that it's a very product. In fact, it's a flowable medium and I would use it for my initial coats and my block to keep my paint film nice and thin and this would dry pretty quickly and I could layer over that maybe after one or two days.

I will note here that this medium is a little thicker and comes out almost like maple syrup due to that higher oil content and this is what I would use on my model, so it would allow me to build up those layers of paint that this is not going to give. any thickness or any impasto texture, these mediums are great for a thinner application of paint, but again, this will dry relatively quickly in a couple of days and eventually this number three medium will come out almost like honey, there's a lot of it. in fact, that base oil base will be very resistant to yellowing.

It is a brilliant product. Most of the mediums I use have some type of backing and this will be the thickest of all. the media like I mentioned and that's what I would use in the end so this company has made it nice and simple and again they are not sponsors in any way but this is what I used when I started and It was a very simple 1-2- approach 3. Now I hear what you're saying. What if you don't have access or the funds to put together all of these sophisticated means? Well the good news is that you can create media in your own studio and it is actually very easy to do and sometimes it can have great results so here for this media I am going to show you a trick that I learned many years ago and that is to just use two ingredients gum turpentine here an artist distilled in urban time and stand the oil and we are going to follow the same principle of working with grease in Lane and we are going to make progressively more fatty media for the last stages of the painting now just to help me in case Make a mess and splash some of this turpentine on me.

I'm going to wear some gloves. I recommend wearing gloves to keep it nice and clean in the studio. We're also going to have some paper towels on hand now for this first medium that I'm going to mix. I love you. will be Lane and this will be reserved for blocking. I'm going to have a little bit more gum turpentine to get that oil content, so here I'm going to have two parts turpentine and one part vegetable oil. Now it's a little tricky and it's tricky to pour it straight out of that bottle, but we'll add as gently as we can.

There we go, getting to know me. I'm going to knock this bottle over and burn the whole place down, so get the cap back. about it and take it there where it can't hurt me now this stand greases wonderful things it comes out very like honey it's really quite thick so again I took a full cup of that turpentine and now I'm just going to add 1/2 cup of this little cup anyway, this is about a quarter metric cup, about half that amount in vegetable oil, so I just measure it with that and this right here is going to be a really beautiful lean paint medium and it's really simple.

Just two ingredients, just make sure you scoop out every last bit before you start using it. I want to make sure I get as thorough a mix as possible now that there's a lean paint medium and that's going to be great for blocking and that would be really good just to thin out some of my brush marks and prepare a surface that's going to dry pretty quickly. Now let's make a little bit fattier paint medium and for this I'm going to use a mixture of more oil and a little less turpentine so I'm going to use a part of each so I'm just going to do half a measure of turpentine and again just half a measure of vegetable oil.

Now this year I can see that it is already a little thicker, it seems like something beautiful, but no. It smells very bad, distilled turpentine does not have as much vapor as regular gum turpentine or mineral spirits. I can't take it anymore, in fact I have quite an allergic reaction, but the gum turpentine is not that bad. but look, if any of these fumes bother you, you can always use an odorless mineral solvent, but again, if you're going to use any solvent, I recommend doing it in a nice big open space or at least having some ventilation. and now finally we want to make a really thick paint medium so we're going to have four more supports in this one plus turpentine and this would be reserved for the top layers so here for this one I'm going to add almost a cup full to parts of that support.

I love the smell of this carrier oil, it's fantastic and we'll add about half that amount again from the distilled terms and that will reduce it a little bit and help. Reduce that thickness of the support well, now I'm going to shake it up and make sure it's mixed well before I paint with any of these, but here we go, we have a medium number one, a number two and a number three, not now. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they are exactly the same as Art Spectrum or any other brand, this is just a simple method you can use in your own studio to have a reliable system that follows those principles.

We were talking about grease in the lane, slow drawing over fast drying, so here we have number one, number two, and number three, and just to make sure I don't get confused while I'm painting, I'm going to mark it with a marker right on the cap just to make perfectly clear the proportions that I'm using if you want to do this in your own studio in this jar medium number one we have one part oil to two parts turpentine in the medium number two we have got one part oil to one part turpentine, equal parts of both and then in medium number three we have two parts oil and 1 part turpentine, our fattest mixture and again we are getting fatter as we go with these mediums that said in no time when I'm mixing this with my paint oil painting.

Am I going from one part medium to three parts paint? If I used too much of the number three medium here, for example, I'm going to be waiting a long time for this medium to dry. It could still be wet after a week of applying this with my paints. Now I really love the analogy I heard from Virgil Eliot and that pigments suspended in oil look a lot like bricks in a wall if you imagine those bricks are your pigment particles. and the oil and the substrate they float on is like the mortar between those bricks, if you have too much mortar you will have a very weak structure, so it is much better to use less medium with the paint, but here I am using about a half to three parts of paint at most and if I do that I will avoid problems now the support oil is a heat-treated linseed oil or thickened by the sun and again you saw the consistency and thickness of that oil is although it looks quite yellow on the bottle, this product is much more resistant to yellowing than regular refined linseed oil and that is why it is the oil of choice for mixing media like this, now it is a great public health and safety advertisement here if you are going to work with oils and solvents you should be aware that this is an incredibly dangerous thing, maybe you don't believe me, it seems like a harmless oil, in fact it is practically non-toxic, so what am I talking about?

Well, you saw me using paper towels here to clean up like always. Making these means and I like to keep things nice and clean in the studio, however, I have all these paper towels here in this trash can and what can happen if I'm not careful is that they will start to generate heat and even burn Spontaneously when this oil starts to oxidize, it gives off an enormous amount of heat and it's surrounded with all this combustible material and this will reach a flash point and it will ignite and I can burn this entire studio down with all these paints. so it's incredibly dangerous if you don't believe me take a look at the links in the description below.

I've linked some YouTube videos of people using this as an experiment. This can be an incredibly dangerous thing, so deal with it. I just pour some water over the top of the trash can or if I have a rag, I'll dunk them in a bucket of water. That way I know I'm okay and safe in the studio and I'm not going to burn out. Writing down all my hard earned work now I wasn't going to include this in the video but I thought I would make a quick mention about olio gel and it's made by Rublev.

This is a fantastic product that I have tried. Very good results so far and I'm still experimenting. It has two ingredients, fumed silica and linseed oil, and makes a fantastic gel-like paste that is great for spreading oil colors, so here you can see as soon as it comes out. Can you tell how thick it is now? You can add some body to your paint film, but I love using it as a thin application when mixed with paint. It can spread my colors, but it's also really fantastic for some glazing effects if used quite thinly now. I wouldn't extend it to the level they have on the natural pigments website.

This can be taken quite far, in fact, maybe beyond that half-to-three-part painting I was talking about earlier, but I'm still experimenting with this one. I actually used this olio gel over the top of a liquidand again that might be breaking a rule, but using it on top of the liquid blocking the portrait of Stephanie you see behind me now is generally not considered a good idea. mix different mediums, but here I was still keeping the fat on the lean principle and also working with something that dries slower over something that dries faster, so here this will dry in a few days and will have about the same speed of drying than your normal oil paints would be, but I'm really enjoying this so far, it has no smell or smoke because it has no solvents or dryers, it's just linseed oil and silica, that's it, again, I'm very happy with this. product I'm really enjoying the results so far, check it out.

I'll put a link in the description below, now I'll give you quite a bit of information in this video and I'll have to come back to the topic of media in a future video and even incorporate a little more of this information into my regular painting tutorials, but before I go , let me tell you some of the resources referenced in the study and some of my favorite books. First, we have the artist's manual by Ralph Mayer, this is an absolutely fantastic book to explain a lot of the fundamentals, the pigments, the oils, the varnish mediums, all this technical material that goes into oil painting, this book has it now .

Some of the information may be considered outdated, but I really love referring to this. It certainly gives me a lot of information to move forward in the study. Now another of my favorite books is this one. by Virgil Eliot is called traditional oil painting and I constantly refer to this in the studio, as well as on the Facebook page of the same name. Now you can search for a few key terms on that Facebook page and find all kinds of discussions about medium varnishes. pigments and bases, anything to do with oil painting, you will find it on that traditional oil painting Facebook page and Virgil Elliot himself enters the conversation very often.

I'll put a link in the description below. I also love this book. by Michael Wilcox calls it glazing now this is for the more technical painters there is a lot of information there on some historical paint applications and again I constantly refer to this one in the studio too now you may feel overwhelmed but don't as long as you Stay true to the principles we talked about at the beginning of this video of working fat over lean, thick over thin, flexible over stiff, and slow drying over fast drying. In fact, I was having a conversation recently with an art conservator and she was telling me that many of the problems she is solving in paintings are a result of artists not observing those key principles, as long as we focus on the ones we should. be clear with our paintings and them.

It will last through the ages, a big THANK YOU to Skillshare for sponsoring this video and again, if you want to get a two month free trial, be sure to click the link in the description below. I really hope you enjoyed this. video and if you did click the like button if you want to come back for more painting videos like this make sure you are subscribed to this channel as always you can find me on Instagram and Facebook. but most importantly make sure you subscribe through my website at Andrew Tischler. Don't worry, thank you very much for visiting us.

See you soon.