| Webmaster's notes: Although her earlier demo, below, had been in Genesis Heat-Set Oils Melanie has now moved back to "real" oils but using (odourless) Liquin instead of conventional thinners. She uses a fairly limited pallette (2 or three colours around each primary) and only a couple of brushes (a flat #7 and a round #5, both nylon from Rosemary Brushes). |
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| For this demo she used a 24" x 20" MDF board. This is
too big for out-of-doors work. Her biggest pochard box takes 14" x 10" although
she usually works smaller than that. She expects to get several sketches done
during each outdoor session. This time she had three sources: a pencil sketch (for composition and colour notes) and two unrelated oil sketches to help her with the sky and sea and a central boat. |
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| Much of her outdoor work is devoted to sketching in
oils. Sketches can be used later either as source material (like here) or as
under-paintings. The problem with painting over your sketches is that you may
well ruin them and lose them for ever. She would not normally paint over a pencil drawing but she finds it so easy to make mistakes with sailing boats that she didn't want to risk it for a demo (where time is so important). Only the boat was drawn with any precision. |
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| She started (unusually for her?) with the sky, using several blues greyed down with orange and magenta. This allowed her to go straight to the sand, mud and water and establish the atmosphere of the whole picture before getting any detail in. There was a fair bit of trial and error in the colour mixing. Although white was put into the blue/grey sky for cloud-tops, mistakes were never painted over - they were wiped off with paper hand-towel (gentler than kitchen paper and stronger and less fiddly than toilet paper) so that the colours stayed fresh. Similarly the palette was very frequently cleaned. |
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Lots of snippets of advice were offered - I noted a
few:
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It wasn't fixed. Honest! I'd agreed, even before Melanie started, that I'd do the write-up of the evening. Then I won the raffle prize: an "Introductory System" (proceeds to the Mozambique flood appeal). There is justice in the world!
Genesis Heat-Set Artist Oils have been in this country, not heavily advertised, for a couple of years. Gerry does not sell them yet but you can get them from Genesis (American Art Clay Co) in Stoke-on-Trent (01782 399219). A quick look at a USA retailer on the Web (www.dickblick.com or 001 309 343 6181) showed prices roughly the same number of dollars as the UK price list shows in pounds but beware of customs duty and postage costs - can double the price.
Odourless, non-toxic, buttery-textured, thixotropic and strongly pigmented, these paints NEVER-dry under normal conditions. Your palette hardly needs cleaning - your brushes never (she claimed - just wipe with kitchen towel to remove excess paint, although if you object on principle to preserving your brushes with paint you could use isopropyl alcohol). You can work on almost any support that can survive temperatures up to about 140 C (say 280 F), so paper, card, canvas (Melanie's choice) and board are OK. The support must not have an oil-based primer (or be previously oil painted), although acrylic's fine if it's thoroughly dry.
You are advised not to try to mix the paint with oils, acrylics or water (it comes with its own special mediums) but isopropyl alcohol can be used. When you first start a picture it is much like oil or acrylic except that even if you leave it for months the texture does not change. BUT HERE'S THE MAGIC BIT. When you decide you need a dry surface, you cure the paint with a special electric heater (or in the oven). This leaves it as tough as well-dried acrylic - scrubbable without damage and ideal for further coats. These can be transparent glazes or thick enough to obliterate the original completely.
Melanie took us through the painting of a very pleasing London street scene, deliberately making errors to show how easy they were to correct. She was also refreshingly relaxed and honest about the limitations of the new paints. There is a very wide range of colours but she took time to find the ones that suited her. The dried surface is slightly matt (like unvarnished oils) and she was not sure what effect the glazing medium gave (conventional varnish is hopeless). The need for a power supply means that this paint is perhaps better suited to studio use than to al fresco painting.
Since the jars of paint are not cheap (although they seem to last for ages) one tends NEVER to clear ones pallet - this also means that you need a pochard-like box to carry it. If you fail to heat ALL the areas with paint on (e.g. round the edges of the canvas) you are likely to get wet paint on your furniture, clothes and car! All in all, a great evening.
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