I’ve had a couple of snow days…. and spent them being sick. So now I’m using my time figuring out how to make the right kind of greys (that I didn’t need last Sunday….)
A long time ago in CassArt, when you had to go down to London because they didn’t ship, I bought myself some liquitex basics as LachriFineArt recommends them. It was a pack of 36 of small tubes of a massive variety of colours. And I never used them. I also had to odd tube of Golden, System 3 and Windsor and Newtons Student range from when I thought I didn’t like oil paints, about ten years ago.
I did struggle to mix colours with them that weren’t garish or chalky. I did find that the colour shift due to drying was quite extreme. Or just not what I’m used to being an oil painter. It looked visibly greyer.
I also used Windsor and Newton Professional acrylic paint and found the drying time to be longer and the colour shift minimal (I couldn’t tell the difference after leaving a painting to dry and walking back to look at it later, more scientific approach coming at a later date.) Out of the acrylic paint in my stash, the Windsor and Newton professional are my favourites.
I tried mixing up yellows with purples and some earth reds and found that the earth reds that I had were far to bright. So I ditched my red oxide and burnt umber and started mixing in blue. I can’t say that using a particular type of yellow affected it over all.
It was much more like it, and when I went to Blackhall Rocks on the 11th of March i found mixing their greys came much more naturally to me. Now I need to do the same for the blues and the cliffs in sunshine.
Susanna Heath 