MATERIALS with Mathew Lynn
Materials Guide - Portraits, Figures, Still Life, Scapes, Abstraction
This is my full guide for drawing and painting
– including some extended thoughts on important parts of my teaching. If you haven’t painted before (or not very much), start by choosing a particular medium and work your way through each basic list found at the end of this guide, OR via the Basic List link above. There is also a lot of important universal information found in the Oil Painting section (so it’s not repeated), I recommend you read through that too!
Some notes on the importance of all the disciplines
It’s very important to know that all the disciplines work together in a circular way to make you a better artist! Still Life teaches you rendering of objects and the differences within objects, which for example will help you with Landscapes in understanding the difference between the upper and lower parts of trees. Rendering will help you with Portraits, but portraits require a certain precision in understanding the interrelated scale of shapes and features and how they need to work together, this precision will help you in every discipline in terms of control and placing things exactly where you want them, including in Abstraction. Without experience in abstraction, you will be closed off to the dimension of interpretation and transformation in your Still Life, and so on.
Still Life > Scapes > Portraits > Abstraction > Still Life
Other important things I like to help you with
Awareness and presence
I may often ask you about your sense of awareness and presence, and what’s happening with your mind while you’re working - in terms of analysis via intellect versus intuitive flow. Sometimes this is where crucial blockages occur, and this is where process work can be SO important and beneficial. This means, philosophically, that I only ever want to act as a conduit to help you see what is already perfect and unique within you, not bending you to how I happen to work!
First, we need to be present as ART, and then everything else will follow naturally - our work is a reflection of and document of our presence.
Skill
It’s also very important to understand that ‘Skill Level’ is not ‘us’! Skill level is secondary to understanding what we are meant for, what we are meant to be doing. This is why some of the very greatest artists can actually have quite limited skills!
Visual universe
It’s also always important to remember that we are inhabiting a visual universe when we are working, that has visual meaning, that has its own visual logic and sense of play, that often necessarily escapes verbal description! So much of our practice is about becoming accustomed to this.
Developing your eye
Another fundamental part of my teaching method is helping you to become familiar with relevant contemporary and historical artists (across all cultures and time) through my large body of research (that I have with me at all times), and how important this is for developing your eye and demystifying the art-making process.
Drawing, Studies & Process Work
Studies
I like my students to always have sketching materials on hand to make initial studies, for practicing marks, and to help when a work gets stuck, it’s usually the first thing I’ll ask you to do. Try at the very least to have a sketchbook and pencils, but colour studies are sometimes a better way to resolve something, so a small gouache or watercolour set and a cheap water media pad can be great to have on hand. You can also just do small colour studies with your oils or acrylics on oil sketch paper or cheaper water media paper.
Process Work
Distinct from studies, Process Work in monochrome or colour is a wonderful way to loosen up before you start, but also extremely important when you want to move through variations of an idea or explore abstraction. It is a sequential exploration of ideas which allows you to clarify what is essential before you start your painting, and leaves you with a fast-moving trail of separate works, so you can observe your insight as it unfolds. It is wonderful for helping you to loosen up on the continuum from strict representation to pure abstraction. Also wonderful for finding your motifs, and understanding and developing your personal mark language. Crucially, for abstract painters it can help untangle works that sometimes have too many ideas!
I also do this study and process work on a bigger scale using full size watercolour sheets and loose acrylic, so you can scale this up to suit your expression and scale of mark making. Another method I use is pasting brown wrapping paper together to form very large drawing areas.
For dedicated drawers not planning to paint, just bring in all your normal equipment!
Follow this guide below (you don’t need everything!), sketchbook and pencils being the most important.
• A4 Sketchbook or paper
• Pencils - bring in a range such as H, B, 2B, 6B
• Staedtler rubber
– we will also trim this into wedges for precision removals
– I prefer this rubber so I suggest you always have one, but you might also like kneadable rubbers if you have a Charcoal technique
• Knife for sharpening
• 30cm Ruler
– only if you think you’d like to use a grid
• Any other drawing materials you like
– such as Charcoal, Chalk Pastels, Oil Pastels, Oil Sticks, Conte Crayon etc.
• Gouache or Watercolour set
– or just your oils or acrylics for your Studies and Process
• Water media pad such as Art Spectrum Draw & Wash Pad 210gsm (Smooth)
• Full size watercolour sheets 56x76cm 300gsm
• Oil sketch pad such as Canson Figueras 290gsm
• A larger cheap Cartridge Pad
– can also be great for big loose process sketches and practicing marks, particularly for abstraction.
Oil Painting
(Note: you must use an odourless system for oil mediums and solvents!)
Colours
Essential for rendering basic skin tones, but also most things. These are also the 11 essential colours for my Colour Mixing Workshop, that covers all opaque and transparent painting in the context of the broader history of painting and all genres.
• Titanium White
• Ivory Black
• Ultramarine Blue (make sure you have standard Ultramarine)
• Yellow Ochre
• Indian Red (Red Oxide that has a purple hue)
• Burnt Umber
• Alizarin Crimson (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Red (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Yellow Light (or cheaper equivalent – if in doubt bring Lemon Yellow)
• Phthalo Blue
• Phthalo Green
Also, these additions can be very useful (or any other colours you like!):
• Cadmium Orange (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cobalt Blue (or cheaper equivalent)
• Magenta
• Quinacridone Rose (the only way to get opaque hot pink!)
• Dioxazine Purple
Art Spectrum is a reasonable basic artist quality range, but I use mostly other brands depending on which version works best for me - including Old Holland, Michael Harding and Wallace Seymour.
You don’t need to buy the expensive version of a particular colour, but you will notice the difference in terms of colour strength (and opacity with the Cadmiums). Also, the more expensive artist quality brands will go further, because there is more pure pigment ground into the oil and packed into each tube.
Probably the most obvious example of this in my personal range is Old Holland Yellow Ochre Light (my selected Yellow Ochre). It is unbelievably concentrated, rich and powerful - and makes many other brands look insipid. Yellow Ochre is a key colour with an incredible range of uses, so this can actually be an area of weakness in your painting if you don’t have a good one!
Most of the 11 essential colours are the Series 1 price generally, so you may be able to have your oil collection in a better brand. Alizarin Crimson (transparent), Cadmium Red (opaque) and Cadmium Yellow Light (opaque) are the expensive ones (Series 4 and up), and aren’t really replicated well in the ‘Hue’ (cheaper) version, so if you can do it I recommend starting with them. In the end you will enjoy your painting more!
Special note for portraits and flesh
Flesh tones, from the time of the Egyptian Fayum portraits, through to Titan, Velasquez, Manet and so on, have only ever required a very limited palette based around Lead White, Black, Earth Yellow, Earth Red, and perhaps one stronger red like Vermillion. Contemporary painting allows us to go in any direction we want, but it is essential to understand how rendering simple flesh works!
Those of you who have worked with me know that I talk about identifying ‘colour families’, and that when we approach flesh we need to think about and understand the basic ‘flesh family’ - how to put it together, how to push it around, and how to find the path back to our flesh base!
With our modern pigments we always need to start with these key colours for a basic understanding of flesh (of all kinds):
• Titanium White (I still use the gorgeous Cremnitz (lead) White occasionally for portraits)
• Ivory Black
• Yellow Ochre - acrylic painters use Yellow Oxide
• Indian Red - acrylic painters use Red Oxide
Also extremely useful (and basically necessary):
• Cadmium Red
• Alizarin Crimson
Some of you may be familiar with the Zorn Palette (White, Ivory Black, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red), which is similar and a very good system, but I encourage people to use Indian Red first, and Cadmium Red then where necessary. Indian Red has many wonderful flesh qualities that will make your experience more direct - not just with fewer steps, but also truth to flesh materiality.
Cadmium Red comes into its own when you need very subtle pink tones in highlights, and for younger complexions. Using real Cadmium Red and Alizarin Crimson in flesh is one place where you’ll notice the huge difference compared to the ‘Hue’ versions. Within the flesh system they also carry flesh materiality perfectly.
Understanding Red Ochres and Oxides
It can be a little confusing understanding the Red Ochres and Oxides: in oils we can get all forms of it, including Indian Red (heading to violet and opaque), Light Red (heading to orange and opaque), Venetian Red (somewhere in the middle and opaque). Indian Red can also be called Persian Red, and Light Red is sometimes called English Red! Then there is Transparent Red Oxide as well!, but we use this more for glazing and I don’t recommend it for flesh.
Simply put, Red Ochre is the natural clay form and Red Oxide is the iron oxide mineral. Acrylic is generally formulated with Red Oxide.
Painting flesh is a particular dance in opacity and subtle modulation of ‘colour-tone shapes’, and classic opaque Indian Red carries so many secrets - not only for flesh.
Colour Mixing and Tones
As mentioned above, these colours will give you an essential range from which you can mix and glaze virtually everything. This is covered extensively in Mathew’s 2-Day Colour Mixing Workshop. It’s also the best way to understand ‘source’ pigments that are often found combined together in one tube, but these tubes can become redundant when you understand this - for example all turquoises in tubes tend to be a mix of Titanium White, Phthalo Green and Phthalo Blue!
Opacity and Transparency
It’s very important to know when you need to paint opaquely, and when transparency is required. We tend to use both at various times in a painting, but often a painting can fall apart when there isn’t sufficient ‘Body Colour’. Body colour is the opaque part of your painting that projects physical presence outwards towards the eye, it suggests volume and weight, and gives objects a necessary three-dimensionality.
We use part of our pigment range to bring these effects of opaque colour, often based around Titanium White and Yellow Ochre. Ivory Black plays a crucial role in opaque painting, as does Indian Red. It is a system for making stable base body colours that can be tinted in any colour direction, and that behave optically like the actual objects we are perceiving. It is particularly important with flesh.
Transparent colours are used to tint your body colours, but are also essential for glazing, which is a process of applying a transparent colour over a mixed body colour (that’s already dry) to achieve subtle colour changes. For example, you can make an amazing green by applying a blue glaze over yellow body colour, and the optical effect will be completely different than if you tried to mix that green.
Tone
Tone is an essential part of making body colour. Most successful tones in a painting are created by fluency in opaque painting, and tone should be one of the cornerstones of your representation and invention. There is also a completely different system for achieving tones with transparency, through subtly adjusting body colour, or simply with thinner passages of paint. We will look at both these systems. Tonal subtlety is an essential part of how we perceive the world, it may even be more important than colour!
You will have your favourite colours, but I encourage you to try this efficient limited palette of 11 colours, which comes from the broader history of painting knowledge, and that takes in all genres.
Working with your palette
Learning how to work your palette and keep it in order is also extremely important! We spend a lot of time on our palette, and you should persevere and try to solve as much of your mixing as possible there. When you make a mistake on your palette (or in your painting) you should fix it straight away until you get it right, as these mistakes tend to accumulate and infect each other!
With familiarity, you’ll eventually be able to make a mental plan knowing which colours you’ll be using for a session, even down to the amounts you lay out!
Some people are taught to only mix with a palette knife, which can be great for particular things, but this can hold you back with your fluency and feel, by putting an extra step between you and just mixing directly with your brushes, or when pushing mixed colours subtly in certain directions, and finally in developing an instinct for what’s actually in your brush. Everything gets back to the brush - introducing medium, how you load it, how you unload it, and the increasing sophistication with which you use it at the mixing stage, and then onwards to making your marks. The wisdom needs to be in the brush.
This is distinct from palette knife and spatula painters, whose wisdom needs to be deeply in those tools!
Another very important thing - you will notice if you look at artist self-portraits that their palettes don’t have endless pre-mixed ‘values’ set up before they paint! This system is a good way to learn and understand what you are seeing, and you might prefer to do things this way, but I would encourage you to get your wisdom in the brush also!
Understanding colour
I tend to teach directness in everything, and it’s the same with colour. The simplest way to understand colour (through observation) is to ask yourself “what pigments are actually in that thing!" If we know our pigments well, it takes care of all the technical colour theory, which can create a lot of unnecessary confusion. It’s important to know it, but we are working with paint!
Paint colours don’t adhere strictly to the colour wheel, this is about the nature and interaction of the actual pigments. The best example of this Cadmium Yellow Light (which tends towards Lemon), but is the most useful strong yellow because you can achieve beautiful clean greens AND good oranges. A central yellow like Cadmium Yellow can’t do this.
Finally (and gently!)
It’s important for you to know that some teachers only teach you colour from within the boundaries of their own practice, having very little experience in say traditional flesh or still life - this is not the way I teach! This colour range is designed for you to be able to handle everything and every genre from a good foundation, and that includes a crucial understanding of Ivory Black.
I conceive of painting in multiple (and often contradictory) ways, but I would be most closely connected in my technical lineage with the Australian Tonalists, learning by osmosis with a very dear friend who studied directly under one of Max Meldrum’s students. They were often laughably dogmatic, but it produced one of our greatest and most poetic painters in Clarice Beckett. They revered Velazquez, and a kind of direct vision and truth to optical experience, where colour and tone is perceived very quickly, and transformed directly with great skill and simplicity, even abstraction.
Oil Brushes (long handle style brushes, also used for Acrylics)
It is crucial to have a good range of brushes for a variety of marks and purposes. Oil painters need more brushes because it’s best to keep each colour you use on a separate brush, especially for the areas that require more detailed work where you are painting multiple colours and tones. It’s important to avoid the habit of cleaning one brush each time you want to change colour, a habit you might have picked up from Acrylics.
You will also use different brushes at different stages of the painting. For example, when ‘blocking in’ at the start of a painting, you will use large brushes (cheap ones are better) that will help you sketch the composition in quickly, and that you can be a bit rough with. Later on you will move on to more precise brushes to paint details, these ones you can spend a bit more money on.
As a guide you should always try to use the biggest brush possible for a passage of painting!, this will build your fluency and sense of energy and mark making in your work, and will stop you from getting bogged down unnecessarily and imprisoned by a small brush. In time you will develop your favourite range, and specific types for specific things.
Numbering system
Oil painting brushes are larger (longer handle) and have a different numbering system to the shorter handle watercolour brushes, your local art shop will be able to explain this to you.
To add a level of confusion to this, many European brands double the brush number on the long handles so that No.12 can also be No.24 in another range! The NEEF 95 Stiff Synthetic has this doubled numbering system, this is a brush I recommend especially for Acrylic painters, and for Oil painters in the fine work sizes - (when required) making fine and precise marks in oil portraits is much better with these, and I don’t use hog bristle brushes for this anymore.
Brush Range
In general, it’s good to have this range of sizes and numbers which you can spread across the various types of hog bristle or stiff synthetic style brushes, described below. Remember, these numbers are sometimes doubled!
2 x No.12
2 x No.10
2 x No.8
2 x No.6
2 x No.4
2 x No.2
2 x No.1
As a simple guide, the big brushes (No.12 & No.10) can be Cheap Hog Bristle 582 ROUND (also great for dry blending and punishing), and the remainder can be a mixture of cheap and better quality Hog Bristle or Synthetic ROUND or FILBERT.
Acrylic painters only need one of every size generally, and the NEEF 95 Stiff Synthetic FILBERT would be my strong recommendation for you. These are incredible brushes and I recommend the Filbert shape, at least for people starting out.
Brushes are a big investment - you will probably do most of your general to detailed painting with No.6, No.4 and No.2, so as long as you can keep colours separate in this range, washing other brushes as you go in class can work, and you can keep your costs down.
For Still Life, Hog Bristle and Synthetic FILBERTS will give you more control and mark variety than anything else for this ‘detail’ range (No.6, No.4, No.2). You may like them for Portraits also. I trained on high quality Rounds and they are my actual preferred brush.
In addition to this range, I always have a dry No.12, No.10, No.8 & No.6 Cheap Hog Bristle ROUND (based on the Eterna 582 shape) on hand for dry blending, they are so inexpensive, and so useful! The 582 is a generic ‘dome’ shape, not the same as the better quality round shape.
The NEEF 95 Stiff Synthetic Filbert is also a great option for oils (and the Rounds), but you must be scrupulous with your brush cleaning!
Brush Types
Cheap Hog Bristle ROUND (Eterna 582 shape) – you can actually paint most things with this type predominantly in your range, but they can be very difficult with details, and it depends on the marks you like to make. A round brush is much more versatile generally, and these cheaper ‘dome’ shape rounds can be used for most of your blocking-in and preliminary work, which can be more punishing on brushes. Their very rounded ‘dome’ shape can be excellent later on as a dry brush and cheap blender for manipulating the wet paint surface.
Good Quality Hog Bristle ROUND – the most versatile brush, because the better-quality ones come with a pronounced point. They can be very gestural and expansive, and then very accurate for finer marks from moment to moment, which will help you with your fluency and speed. Sometimes on good days you may find yourself using very few brushes, helped by the versatility of your brush.
Good Quality Hog Bristle FILBERT – this is a fantastic brush combining a rounded shape with a chisel profile like flat brushes. It’s good to have some of these in your medium to small sizes. They can make nice sharp points and lines, as well as soft shapes. Some people might like to use them exclusively for details, and even large ones for blocking in. The NEEF 95 Stiff Synthetic FILBERT can virtually supercede these, but some people prefer the organic quality of using real Hog Bristle.
Cheap or Good Quality Hog Bristle FLAT or BRIGHT – flat brushes can be very difficult, because you will always be fighting with the pronounced sharp chisel shape that they make, nevertheless it’s nice to have some of them for particular uses and tight corners, particularly the smaller ones in the range above. Some people like to paint exclusively with these types of marks, so it’s no problem if that’s your preference! The Bright is a shorter bristle style flat brush, The 579 Flat is the generic cheap version, related to the 582 Round.
Synthetic Hog Bristle ROUND, FLAT or FILBERT – there are some extremely good brushes available made from a kind of synthetic hog bristle, you may like to try some of these, or even use them exclusively! They tend to be very expensive so you’ll want to look after them and keep them clean. As mentioned, the best I’ve found is the NEEF 95 Stiff Synthetic, which come in all shapes.
Water Media Synthetics in a variety of shapes – can be great for particular uses and types of oil painting, especially if you are working small, or your work is extremely fine, but they’re generally too soft to use with oil paint and will be VERY frustrating! You need a brush that has a certain amount of power and strength to push Oil and Acrylic paint around.
Please also bring any other brushes that you like to use! People working expressively and in abstraction will have their favourite brushes and implements for their personal mark-making. There are some amazing large scale brushes that you may love, look for the Omega range of brushes.
Brush Washing
Everyone’s least favourite part of the day, and the first skill you need to master in oil painting! - it is essential that you get into good habits with cleaning your oil brushes, because a badly washed brush can make your next painting session unpleasant, even stressful. Try not to come to class with hard brushes!
Brushes need to be able to unload what you spend all that time mixing, and in an optimal way. If you have residual oil, medium or paint drying in the bristles, it can become very difficult to load and unload the paint, and the brush actually starts scratching everything off.
I would recommend bringing a proper portable brush washer with strainer to class, they can be found for less than $30 on eBay. They can be handy with cleaning on the go and have a sealed lid for easy transport. https://ebay.us/m/IX8n9v
The modern quick-drying Alkyd mediums are very hard on brushes, so you need to be extra vigilant during your session to see if your brush needs a wash on the go if it’s starting to dry out. Three hours is window you want to keep within. I’ve been experimenting with other cleaners that help combat the sticky build up of this resin. If you have a more traditional medium with no drying agent cleaning is MUCH easier!
If you’re taking your brushes home for final wash, wrap them in glad wrap to slow the drying process. Squeeze as much paint as you can out of the brush first with paper towel or newspaper, and then wash them thoroughly with a proper brush washer that has a strainer. A jar with solvent won’t really give you a good clean, because you will always be stirring up the oily sediment with your washing action. Many of you have worked out a good way to get all this done at the end of class.
You can also use a completely non-solvent system for brush washing with brush cleaning solution products available from art shops.
In my studio I still use Low Odour Mineral Turps for brush cleaning (sometimes using a respirator) because there is often a large pile to wash! I use two large-scale oil brush washers with raised grills, so the heavy pigment is separated. They are lidded so you can keep fumes to a minimum in the studio.
Finally, wash your brushes with a simple soap and warm water, I use a Sunlight bar. This helps get the remaining dirty and oily solvent out of your brush, and the bristles will be nice and soft again. This doesn’t have to be long and laborious!, just dip the brush in warm water, rub it into the soap, and lather it up on a hard surface, then rinse.
As mentioned above, I sometimes need an additional cleaner at the end that can deal with the remaining Alkyd resin that’s still sticky in the brush. The Chroma Incredible Brush Cleaner seems pretty good at this job!, but don’t soak your brushes in it!
Oil Mediums & Solvents
Working in a class situation we always need to use an odourless system when oil painting.
Quick-drying odourless medium and artist quality odourless solvent is often the easiest option, my personal favourites being Galkyd or Galkyd Lite medium and Gamsol solvent by Gamblin - though anything with Alkyd resin can be extremely harsh on brushes! Galkyd can be a bit troublesome because it’s SO sticky and THE most aggressive dryer - so Galkyd Lite is probably a better place to start. It has a lower viscosity Alkyd base than Galkyd, and is designed for more fluid work and slightly more open time.
Odourless solvent is relatively expensive, but Gamsol tends to be reasonably priced within the range available in Australia. You still need to be careful with odourless solvents as they do have low toxicity.
Oil Mediums help the pigment to stay bound when the paint is thinned out. But working with a medium can be very much about personal preference for the type of surface you’re after.
Galkyd is essentially a glaze medium, and will potentially make surfaces very glossy and resin-like depending how you use it. Galkyd Lite less so. For certain types of exacting traditional painting you may want this, so you can see all the tones properly, but in expressive painting you might like for there to be beautiful variations of the paint surface, or for it all to be generally quite matte. This is where you can experiment with cutting the medium with solvent to maintain some binding quality, but to avoid glossiness.
I’m having good results with a Gamsol 75%-Galkyd 25% mix to achieve a dryer, more matte surface quality. I want my contemporary paintings to look like large Gouaches. You might like to bring your own pre-mixed version to class. As I mentioned, I recommend trying Galkyd Lite first, for even Gamblin 3-in-1 if you want quicker drying.
Other mediums are also available, but it’s very much about your own personal experimentation and types of surfaces you’re after. There are also some completely non-toxic oil mediums available such as the Gamblin Solvent-Free Fluid Painting Medium.
You can simply use Artists Refined Linseed Oil as a medium (nearly every oil colour except White is ground in it), but the drying time is much slower, and it may hold you up while you’re waiting for it to dry. Also, Whites will yellow when Refined Linseed Oil is added to them, and mediums are constructed for minimal yellowing. Stand Linseed Oil is often a better oil to use for this reason, but in conjunction with solvent as it is extremely viscous and slow drying.
Stand Oil is one of the key ingredients in the famous Ralph Mayer painting medium, that also includes Dammar Varnish and the traditional and very volatile Artist’s Turpentine, I made this myself and used it for at least 15 years.
Gamblin 3-in-1 medium is a new addition to their range and could also be a great option for you. It has Alkyd resin and Gamsol, but adds Safflower Oil, so it makes it much more like a traditional medium with the addition of an oil. Safflower Oil is one of the cleanest and non-yellowing oils, so it’s an intriguing mix. One crucial use covered by this medium is the traditional ‘oiling out’ required when patches of paint dry matte, and you need to see the tones again properly. You can also buy Gamblin Safflower Oil by itself.
A general painting rule is to avoid using only solvent as a medium, as the paint film and pigment is substantially stripped of it’s binding, but you can also get wonderful effects and surface qualities using very solvent heavy mixes. It’s good to have an awareness around this and to know what to expect when you break the rules! Sketching on with only solvent is completely fine and in many ways preferable, as you can erase and move your shapes around more easily in these early stages. I tend to go straight on with my 75/25 medium mentioned above, the underpainting definitely ‘fixes’ and can’t be rubbed out when dry.
At the same time, don’t get too worried about ‘Fat over Lean’ in your oil painting so that you’re actually afraid to do any work! As long as you have a simple awareness around the structure of layers and pigments in your painting, it’s very rare to have major problems. Mathew covers this in his Colour Mixing Workshop. In oil painting, we simply need to remember what we’ve done from the surface of the canvas up to the final layers.
Finally, you may simply be a painter that just loves using the paint as it is straight out of the tube, or with an impasto technique without the need for anything else!
Oil Painting Materials
• Drawing, Studies & Process Sketches (see above)
• Colours (see above)
• Brushes (see above)
• Palette:
– could be disposable, but it’s better and far less frustrating if it’s a modern rectangular board shape (30x40cm or roughly A3) - make sure your palette has plenty of mixing space. Two cheap pieces of prepared board in A3 size sitting on a table is just as good, the spare one can be handy when you run out of space but want to keep those colours on the first board going.
• Double Dipper:
– for separate medium and solvent, get the open style with the widest openings so you can get your big brushes easily in and out.
• Mediums & Solvents (see above)
• Rags, paper towels - plenty of these
• Cotton buds:
– extremely helpful for subtle removal of paint in tight spots, great for portraits.
• Spare containers:
– for solvent, or mixing things on the go.
• Palette knife:
– you may like to have couple of these in different shapes.
• Spatulas, scrapers etc.
– anything else you like to make marks with or push paint around.
• A canvas or canvas board (or a few of them)
– Oil Painting Paper is also fine, but can be more difficult to work on and transport. Gesso Boards are also great, and allow you to work in a very different way on a slippery surface.
• Disposable Nitrile gloves (non-latex and tougher)
– it’s always a good idea to wear these when painting and handling oil paint and mediums, they’re at most supermarkets.
• Gamsol or odourless solvent for clean-up in class.
• Stainless steel style oil brush washer with strainer and a sealable lid
– I highly recommend you bring in a proper brush washer, they can be found for less than $30 on eBay https://ebay.us/m/IX8n9v and it means (if necessary) you can wash some of your brushes on the go properly, and also carry it home without spills.
• Taking your brushes home wrapped in glad wrap for a proper clean and wash is probably the best option, as described above, but many people have a great system for doing it straight away in class.
Acrylic Materials
Colours
Similar advice as the oil colours above, but be aware that Acrylics sometimes don’t come in exactly the same colour names. If in doubt have these essential colours at least. With colour, you choose by the apparent colour inside the tube, not just the labeled name!
• Titanium White
• Ivory Black
• Ultramarine Blue (make sure you have standard Ultramarine)
• Yellow Oxide
• Red Oxide
• Burnt Umber
• Alizarin Crimson (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Red (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Yellow Light (or cheaper equivalent – if in doubt bring Lemon Yellow)
• Phthalo Blue
• Phthalo Green
• Brands - Matisse (Flow or Structure) are good basic artist quality options, however the big problem with Acrylics (apart from drying so fast!) is that you have to deal with ‘colour shift’. Colour Shift is when you think you’ve got the right tone for something and then it dries darker! This can be extremely frustrating, especially when trying to paint flesh. It happens because the milky binder dries clear. Some brands such as Golden and Schmincke PRIMAcryl claim to have minimal colour shift, so if you are wanting more control for finer work you might want to consider these brands. Bring in your normal range and your favourites also!
• Brushes
– follow the basic range and advice above in the brushes section, but you’ll only need one of each size because you are constantly washing your brush. Stiffer bristle brushes are good with acrylics, but you may prefer to have predominantly Stiff Synthetic brushes for more control (in long handle), at least for the brushes you use most. I find the Synthetic Hog Bristle Brushes mentioned above particularly wonderful for acrylic! NEEF 95 Stiff Synthetic have a perfect balance of firmness combined with optimal flow from the brush, it’s the perfect acrylic brush.
– it can be very frustrating working finely or in an Old-Masterly way with acrylic on things like flesh, so having the best brushes possible goes a long way to easing this frustration. Drying time can also be very frustrating, so think about having a Drying Retarder in your setup.
– Watercolour style brushes can work well for certain types of acrylic painting, for finer details, but you will still want brushes that have a certain stiffness so you can push your paint around and work with freedom and flow.
– bring in any acrylic style brushes you like.
• Medium
– can be a basic Acrylic Painting Medium, Gel Medium, Impasto Medium, Acrylic Retarder etc. I personally like to use just water.
• Drawing, Studies & Process Sketches (see above)
• Acrylic palette/s with a flat surface
– or just an A3 piece of Perspex (and perhaps a second one), plenty of mixing space is always better with Acrylic!
– a large flat Decor style container with a lid can be great as you can create a wet environment to slow down drying time, and the lid doubles as an extra mixing space.
– some people also love the Disposable Palette Pads (A3 at least please!) because your deposited paint often dries out several times in a normal session.
– I’ve also seen people have a lot of success with sheets of baking paper stretched over a wet rag, you can also buy a ‘Stay-Wet’ palette from art stores.
• Spare containers and a large water container
– there will usually be empty containers wherever I am, but bring one if you’re not sure. A common bad habit is not using a big enough water container on your table, or forgetting to replace your water often.
• Rags, sponges, paper towels, cotton buds, scraper, or anything else you like to use.
• A canvas or canvas board (or a few of them)
• Other Surfaces:
– you may also like to use heavy water medium paper. I personally love using full size 300gsm watercolour sheets when I use Acrylic, and having some water media paper on hand is always a great idea if you need to do a quick colour process sketch to solve something.
– a cheaper water media pad (at least 210gsm) can be great for this problem solving too, and then you’ve got your piece of paper in a convenient size.
– you can also have an even cheaper Cartridge Paper Pad for fast process sketches and practicing marks you might want to make in your main painting.
Important! In class we need to discard the bulk of unwanted acrylic paint by scraping onto paper towel, not washing everything down the sink.
Gouache & Watercolours
Gouache
Gouache may have some different colour names but refer to the acrylic colour above for reference. As I mentioned above, look for the colour you actually need, not just the label on the tube!
Try to get Red Oxide for your earth red, this is especially important for portraits and the Colour Mixing exercises.
Windsor & Newton Gouache comes in more or less all the colours listed above, including Cadmiums, Alizarin Crimson and ‘Red Ochre’, but it’s an expensive option. Art Spectrum has a simplified range without a Red Oxide. Daler-Rowney Gouache has a somewhat simplified list also where you’ll have to do some translating, but they do have an Indian Red.
Gouache is also, in many respects, more like oil painting, because unlike acrylics which always dry waterproof, gouache can be continually pushed around and reanimated, mirroring the ‘open’ period in Oil painting.
Gouache is also extremely good for colour mixing studies, though you are better to do this with your principle medium.
I absolutely love Gouache!, and I find it wonderful (and preferable) for small colour studies and process sketches! My oil painting technique is beginning to mimic the discoveries I make in Gouache!
Watercolour
Watercolour colours follow a different system and can be quite specific, favouring particular transparent pigments, but you can use any that you have, and I can give you advice on this, or simply use a basic watercolour set and you should be covered.
Watercolour most closely resembles glazing in oil painting, so can be wonderful for getting the feel of working transparently. The most important skill in watercolour is the dialogue between the white of the paper, and how it illuminates your colours.
This is also a quintessential oil technique. When I move to the canvas with my oil paints, I essentially use a watercolour technique early on to see all shapes and ‘colour families’ very quickly.
Brushes
This is a very important consideration for Gouache and Watercolour. One common problem is that you may only have everything in a point (round brush)! A similar thing happens when you only use flats in Oil and Acrylic painting with chisel shapes dominating - you can often find yourself fighting with this pointed mark in water media!
Yes, try to have points from fine to large, but also look for filberts, mops, flats and possibly Hake brushes too - the Hake is a Japanese soft large flat style goat hair brush, great for wetting the paper, and also large uniform wash areas.
We used to think of Sable hair as the gold standard, but honestly these days some of the synthetic ranges are extraordinary (and so cheap!), and I never get my old Sables out anymore.
Synthetic ‘round’ brushes are pretty good across the brands, my favourite right now is pretty much everything Pro Arte makes, all shapes - they do an amazing versatile Filbert.
Also, look for Mop brushes, they come in a completely round shape and an oval shape (my preference). They help you cover large areas with ease and control, the small oval Mop is great as a different texture for flattening and softening areas, or making marks with a completely different dynamic. They are generally in white goat hair (softer effect, for blending) or black goat hair (slightly coarser and interesting).
The traditional Squirrel brush is also thought of as a Mop, but will always have a fine point too. If used skilfully, you CAN get all your range of marks with this brush, including swiftly covering a large area or working expressively, and then coming back and using the point to paint details. The synthetic Squirrel brushes are now extremely good!
I also love Japanese and Chinese style brushes used in traditional ink painting and Nihonga style painting.
Remember that you are making a variety of marks - sometimes you are covering a large flat area, sometimes you’re working on fine details, at other times it’s nice to have a brush that is loaded up but with a very fine point to work expansively and with details at the same time.
• Synthetic watercolour brushes in a range of sizes and shapes: fine, medium and a large, or as indicated above.
• Drawing, Studies & Process Sketches (see above)
• Appropriate Palettes for colours and mixing,
– make sure you have plenty of flat space too.
• Water container and extra containers for mixing
– could also be porcelain style nests, ink stones etc.
• Rags, paper towels, cotton buds
• Watercolour paper or watercolour pad.
– it’s always more satisfying using the best brands - like Saunders Waterford (my favourite), Arches is also and obviously amazing. There are some good cheaper options appearing like the Boahong watercolour paper, that one comes in lots of different formats.
– basically you’ll find watercolour paper in Hot Pressed (smooth), Cold Pressed (medium) and Rough.
– 300gsm and 185gsm are the standard weights (thicknesses), but there are heavier ones that can be wonderful depending on your work and how sturdy you need the paper to be.
– I try to use 300gsm most of the time, so that warping is minimal. I like to use Hot Pressed for smaller scale works and Cold Pressed for larger expressive works.
– It can be found in an infinite number of pads, blocks, paper sizes and rolls. I tend to like the heavier weight pads, I’m using Gouache mostly and I find this very convenient and solid. Gouache lets you work like watercolour and with opacity at the same time, so I like a good solid base for this.
• Cheaper water media pads
– are also great to have around for experiments and to practice marks. Try an Art Spectrum Draw & Wash Pad 210gsm for studies, or an even cheaper Cartridge Paper Pad for fast process sketches and to practice marks.