Watercolor Over Casein

One of the things that’s attracted me to casein is how it cures hard after a few days, nevermore to be rewettable. This seemed like a great compromise between gouache and acrylic: reworkable for a while, then layerable. At first I thought I’d do gouache over casein grisaille underpaintings. But more lately it’s occurred to me to glaze over the underpaintings using more transparent watercolors.

Here are my first few experiments. I think they’ve gone pretty well! Mostly earth colors, white and black in casein underneath, and super transparent watercolors for the drapery. Here they are:

After Diego Velazquez

After Velazquez, but with jaunty cap added! Sometimes When I’m doing master studies, I sometimes just can’t resist the urge to add my own twist. In this one, the blouse (and jaunty cap) is glazed with WN Antwerp (prussian) Blue.

After Jose Maria Acosta

After a fellow I hadn’t heard of before, one Jose Maria Acosta. I found him when I was looking for green drapery in a portrait, since I wanted to try glazing with my new tube of Diopside Genuine from DS. (A review will come a bit later.) Also a touch of WN Rose Madder in the skin tones.

After Robert Henri

Finally, yet another master study of my favorite portrait artist, Robert Henri. In this one the couch is glazed with rose madder, and the dark background with rose madder and prussian blue. The glazes give a depth I don’t think I could swing with just casein or gouache.

I’m currently beginning more experiments, painting directly with watercolor and casein paints mixed together freely. Also going pretty well! More to come…

Mulling Kaolin Clay

I’ve read in many, many places that gouache contains chalk.

But not all of them do. The ones I use—M. Graham, Schmincke Horadam, Winsor & Newton (and certainly my own!)—do not. Some of the paints, like M. Graham’s Prussian Blue, are dark and transparent enough that it’s obvious.

Some of the student-grade and poster paints and some designer paints surely have an opacifier added, but from what I’ve read it’s likely that even those would be as likely to contain blanc fixe (barium sulfate) as chalk.

I personally wouldn’t mind if either one were added to gouache (except for the dark colors), especially if it was there to help stabilize drying shifts in color. (I’ve complained about drying shifts in water-based media here.)

Anyhoo: I came across this post from the USGS about some properties of clays: Environmental Characteristics of Clays and Clay Mineral Deposits. In particular, I was interested in this tidbit:

When a little clay is added to water, a slurry forms because the clay distributes itself evenly throughout the water. This property of clay is used by the paint industry to disperse pigment (color) evenly throughout a paint.

It occurred to me that adding a clay such as kaolin to gouache paint might help stabilize the color on drying. I have some sitting around, which I’ve planned to use to make a different kind of madder lake. So I mulled some up into an aqueous dispersion and tried adding it to my paints.

I’m sad to report that the clay didn’t help with drying shifts; in fact, it generally made things worse. However, I serendipitously discovered a cool property of mulling the clay: it picked up a lot of the color that had become stuck in the mulling plate. You can probably see the difference in color between the mulled clay and the stuff in the bag (including a bit where the red it picked up is quite visible):

Mulling Kaolin Clay

I wiped that plate as clean as I could after mullling my red dispersions, but obviously I didn’t get it all. But the clay seemed to pick up most of what was left. So, if you’re having trouble keeping your mulling plate clean, try mulling some clay in water—it might just do the trick!

Casein from Gouache

For those who either:

1. are thinking about trying casein, but intimidated by the idea of mixing their own aqueous dispersions, or
2. have a bunch of gouache paints lying around and don’t want to purchase a whole new line of paints

You can pretty easily manufacture your own casein paints by mixing gouache paints with casein medium.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened with this first color casein piece, a quick little sketch after Henri:

First color casein sketch!

I had done a few grisailles (you can see some of them here) using Shiva raw umber and titanium white that had been sitting around the place for a few years. (Some casein paints go bad pretty quickly in the tube; I don’t know why these two lasted so long.) I had an idea I liked the medium, and I wanted to try out a color sketch without waiting for my new paints to show up.

So I mixed some of my gouache paints with casein medium. The one I used was Shiva’s Casein Emulsion. Like egg tempera, casein can be dispersed with oil, and that’s what emulsion means in this case. I purchased the stuff for a different purpose entirely, to prime illustration board for gouache painting, but I quickly repurposed it. I mixed roughly equal parts of gouache paint and casein medium. The paints were a little loose for my taste, but otherwise they worked fine. I wound up continuing to use these makeshift casein paints while slowly supplementing them with Shiva tube colors.

The medium, by the way, isn’t perfect; partway through the bottle the oil began to separate and form a puddle on top. But I was able to pretty easily wick this off with a paper towel. There are a couple of others available on Kremer Pigments I’ll also try, and at some point of course I’ll be making my own.

Casein is a wonderful medium—try it out and have fun!

Grisaille Underpaintings in Casein

I’m sure I’ll be posting more on casein, but for now just a short explanation of why I’ve been choosing it over gouache of late:

1. I just like the way it handles. Gouache feels, well, gummy. I have to paint by tiling, softening any edges only after the paint has been laid down. Casein feels creamy. It dries just as quick as gouache, but I don’t know… I feel like I can just paint with it. I can tile or not, just as I prefer. And working with edges seems much easier.
2. After a few days casein cures and becomes water-resistant. That means you can do real underpaintings in it. It’s this aspect of casein that got me to first try it. I thought I’d do underpaintings in casein, then overpaint with gouache. But then I fell in love with the medium, and it’s become my thing.
3. My casein paintings are better than my gouache paintings. ’Nuff said!

So I started with some grisailles (brunailles, really) in umber and titanium white, both from Shiva tubes. Some master studies from Diego Velasquez, one of my very favorite portrait artists:

Casein grisaille after Velazquez

Casein grisaille after Velazquez

And a page of little head studies from Robert Henri (my other favorite portrait artist):

Casein grisaille after Henri

I’m quite interested in the idea of glazing over caseins, with transparent colors in gouache or watercolor (or even oil, if the underpainting is on panel instead of paper). I very much like the idea of using some of the techniques I’ve practiced in oil, but in water-based media. Casein makes that possible.

More to come!

Aqueous Dispersions, Part II

Here’s an article about aqueous dispersions and what they’re for: Aqueous Pigment Dispersions.

I’ve made up some aqueous dispersions from that monster batch of pigments I received. Here they are:

dispersions-starter

Cobalt blue, ultramarine (in the back), alizarin crimson, cadmium red, raw sienna, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow.

The alizarin crimson was by far the most difficult to mull and clean up; I think it took up about as much time as the rest of them put together. And even when I called it finished, the resulting dispersion is weird… slabby, for want of a better term, almost as if it were a natural clay or something. I’m not sure why it behaved like this, but it may be that some of these pigments have been sitting around for quite some time. In any case I’m not really happy with it. I’ll try grinding some with a mortar and pestle before mulling it next time. The cadmium red also took a bit of work for some reason, coming out grainy like a natural earth—which would be great for oil paint, but I’m not so sure about it in water-based media. We’ll see.

The rest of them were easy peasy, dispersing in the water in no time flat.

We’ll have to see how well those containers work out; they were literally bought at Ross, years ago, for like three bucks for a dozen jars or so. I think you can get them at Joann Fabrics. They seem to be doing okay after a few weeks. But if the dispersions start drying out in there, or if the lids start giving me trouble after some use, I’ll have to find some better containers. These, maybe:

LaCon containers

LaCons. I’ve heard they’re all right; an illustrator friend has told me they keep his acrylic paints moist for months at a time.

There are places you can purchase ready-made aqueous dispersions. Natural Pigments has some, as does Kremer (“color pastes,” as they call them); Guerra Paint offers a huge selection of them. Natural Pigments offers mainly earth colors, as you might expect; both Kremer and Guerra have a bismuth vanadate yellow, a color I recommend for anyone trying to get cadmium yellow light off their palette.

More on casein, next!

Christmas Colors

Among the numerous wonderful Christmas gifts I received were these gems from my beautiful wife:

Christmas colors

A jar of cadmium orange pigment, by far my favorite cadmium and pretty much the only cad not represented in my recent pigments windfall; and two (!) tubes of genuine PB33 manganese blue from Vasari, I believe the only brand of it available in an oil paint any longer. I’ve been intensely curious about this color that’s hovering on the edge of extinction. And I’ve been wanting to try out Vasari paints in any case. Nice.

Thanks Joy!

Aqueous Dispersions

When you’re making water-based paints—gouache, casein, egg tempera—you can mull your pigments directly into binder, or you can use aqueous dispersions. Aqueous dispersions are simply pigments that have been mulled into water, without the binder. They can be stored in jars (with well-fitting lids!); then, when you need to put some of a particular color on your palette, you simply grab some of the dispersion, mix it with your binder with a palette knife, and go!

The main reason I’m playing with this right now is that I’ve been realizing casein might just be my medium of choice, for illustration work at least. Aqueous dispersions make a lot of sense to use with casein, because casein paints have a shelf life. They will go bad if you don’t use them quick enough. But aqueous dispersions should stay indefinitely. If my casein medium goes bad, I’ll have to toss it out… but at least I won’t have to discard a bunch of paints along with it.

Mulling aqueous dispersions is both easier and more difficult than mulling paints. It seems easier, until cleanup time. Since you’re only adding water, any drying on the slab reverts the pigment back to, well, pigment. It’ll blow around and get all over everything.

Put the drawer shelf liner under the slab, of course, but beneath that lay down some newspaper. Yes, I know this negates the purpose of the liner. Yes, you’ll thank me. Don’t do it like this:

Raw Sienna dispersion

Mmm, raw sienna. Nice and dirty, the way it ought to be.

Ultramarine dispersion

Ultramarine. You can see it drying around the edges. This was about the time I began to realize how messy this can be.

Boy, look at that color, though. If folks from the Middle Ages could have known how cheap and easy this color would one day become, they’d be absolutely murderous with envy. Something to keep in mind as I wallow in this embarrassment of rich hues.

More on aqueous dispersions later. See you next year!

Custom Aquabord Unboxing

Yesterday I received and unpackaged five panels of Ampersand Aquabord. Custom size!

I’ve been working on smaller, standard Aquabord panels, and I like them for the casein studies I’ve been doing. Like Ampersand’s Claybord, they’re gessoed with an absorbent clay-based white material; unlike the Claybord panels, they’re not mirror-smooth. (They’re essentially what the discontinued “Textured Claybord” product used to be; I did some egg tempera studies on these once upon a time, here and here.) The Claybord surface is a bit slick for my taste, but the Aquabord is quite nice. Its texture seems to grab hold of the paint on the brush, making it easy for me to cover large areas with color.

The only thing that disappointed me about the panels is the sizes available. They’re geared toward fine artists, and that’s great… but in the near term I’m planning to do book cover illustrations. eBook covers mostly have a ratio of 1:1.5 or 1:1.6; the only standard Aquabord in those proportions is the ginormous 24×36″, too big to be practical (although I may just try one out someday!).

Luckily for me, Ampersand makes it easy to order custom sizes. And they’re not even very expensive, not much more than a similarly-sized standard panel from Blick. Contact is at the bottom of the page at aquabord.

Having received advice from several illustrators to double the intended final size of the image to find the best working size for painting, I started with an old standard paperback size of 6×9″ and doubled that for a panel size of 12×18″. I ordered five to try out.

Aquabord packaging

The packaging was solid. The two big panels top and bottom are not the aquabord panels, but somewhat larger boards to protect the product during shipping. Probably production rejects of some type or another, I can gesso the back and use them for sketches, or save them to use for shipping artwork. Here’s the stack of panels nestled in carboard:

Stack

With cardboard removed:

Cardboard removed

The panels are separated by foam:

Packing foam

The panels!

Aquabord panels

Ampersand seems to be a good organization that wants to help out individual artists. That makes me feel all fuzzy.

Pigments Windfall

An amount of pigment has recently come into my possession—quite an amount, in fact. An older artist passed away, and the stash of pigments he left behind was so large I understand it was in some peril of simply being thrown out. I had to keep that from happening, of course. Artist’s pigments are precious!

I have received a total of 71 (!) one-gallon cans of pigment in various states of fullness; 15 five-gallon drums (holy crap!); and one jar of an unidentified blue, say about 400g or so. There’s also a single box left unclaimed, by its photo a lovely-looking violet I expect will be either manganese or cobalt. Excited about that one, still waiting to hear.

Cans of pigment

There’s lots and lots of bone black and raw umber, far more than any artist could ever use in a lifetime of painting. Maybe a mural painter. Also significant amounts of burnt umber, chromium oxide green, viridian, alizarin crimson, and iron oxide red (it’s labeled “light red” but isn’t—it looks more like Venetian red). Plenty of cobalt blue, burnt sienna, raw sienna, yellow ochre, and ultramarine blue; cadmium primrose lemon, yellow, yellow deep, red light, red, red dark, and maroon; and two cans of phthalo green.

I’m still working out just what to do with this monster load of pigments, which we barely managed to fit into the free space in our garage. In the past I haven’t been big on cadmiums, with their overpowering tinting strength, but I suppose I could cut these with calcite or kaolin (both of which I have in plenty) to make them more manageable on the palette—essentially turn them into weaker, student-grade paints. They should last a goodish while that way. I’ve already mulled and tubed of some of the chromium oxide green, viridian, and “light red” in a gouache/casein mixed medium:

Swatches

The second row is with some Winsor & Newton Aquapasto added. See how the watercolor medium helps preserve some of the transparency of the viridian? Pretty cool, huh?

This windfall is timely for me. I’ve just begun my adventures in casein, and with that medium you’ve pretty much got to make some of your own colors (unless you’re completely happy with the ones in Richeson’s Shiva offering). Luckily I’ve got plenty of experience hand-mulling paint, and some of these pigments will give me just the playground I’ll be needing.

I’ve also mulled several other of these pigments into aqueous dispersions, which I’ll post about next.

Drying Shifts in Water-Based Media

With matte, water-based media—gouache, casein, or transparent watercolor—some pigments can suffer a shift in color when losing moisture. The reason for this is physical—the scattering of light, or some such physics thing. The reason this doesn’t happen to the same extent in oil paints is that they remain more or less “shiny,” continuing to scatter light similarly to they way they did before curing, which is close to the refractive index of the surrounding air (again: or some such thing—I never took a physics class in high school, and I’m sure it shows). When gouache or casein dry they effectively go from glossy to matte, so some change in color is to be expected. For a useful (if incomplete) reference on how different pigments behave in watercolor, check Handprint: watercolor drying shifts.

Many artists have learned to deal with this phenomenon. A quick image search for gouache paintings or casein paintings proves this amply. If you’re intimately familiar with your materials, you can keep an eye on which pigments you’re mixing, judge the drying shifts they’ll undergo, and adjust your mix accordingly—before laying it down. If you really know what you’re doing, you won’t be surprised by the result when it changes. Many, many good artists have learned how to do this.

Personally, I can’t deal with it. It freaks me out. I feel like I have enough trouble predicting how a color will look in a composition without having to worry about it changing on me after I lay it down.

Oh, I can handle it to some extent. I have to, if I want to use casein or gouache (which I do—the matte aspect means they’re easy to photograph and reproduce, which makes them ideal for illustrations). I can deal with some loss in saturation, and with small changes in value. But if either one becomes too drastic, I start losing my cool.

So I try to stick with the colors that have smaller drying shifts. One of the reasons I haven’t used natural indigo as much as I would’ve liked is that it loses much of what little saturation it has when it dries. Dry swatch is on the left:

Drying Shift Natural Indigo

What starts out as a lovely deep blue becomes something pretty close to gray. No fun! (Note: while I did paint the newer swatch a bit darker, the photo shows the dry swatch less grayed than in real life. I’ll let you know when I’ve conquered the skill of photographing artwork.)

One of the most dramatic value shifts I’ve seen is the “Ultramarine Blue Deep” in Jack Richeson’s Shiva brand of casein. It may be “deep” when wet, but that’s hardly an accurate description of the dried color. Dry swatch on the left:

Drying Shift Ultramarine Blue Deep

I can’t use that paint. It just changes too much for me to manage it in mixes.

I told some folks at WetCanvas that this was the most extreme shift I’ve ever encountered, but when I wrote that I’d forgotten about my experiments with egg tempera some years ago. My rose madder pigment in egg tempera might have had an even larger shift, with the beautiful deep crimson changing back to the dry pigment color, which is a faded pink. Again, not usable, for me at least.

PBr24 also has something of a drying shift. Luckily, the tube I have happens to be from Schmincke, where they’ve tried to help out with this. Check it out, dry swatch on the left (note: colors are significantly more orange than IRL):

Drying Shift Titanium Gold Ochre

See what they’ve done there? The color displayed on most paint packaging tends to have only a vague relationship with the color inside the tube or pan. This label matches not the paint color in the tube, but the paint color as it will be after it’s dried. And that, my friends, is one of the things that set Schmincke apart from their competitors.