Kremer Pigment is known for their pigments and their vast selection of rare and hard to find materials. Their only ready-made oil paint is cremnitz white. You can order this white in linseed or walnut oil. Their linseed white is excellent–among the best I’ve tried. A 250 ml jar is $62, which is a bargain compared to other top brands. A 225ml tube from Old Holland is $200+.
Normally, I don’t like paint in jars or cans but my glass jar of white from Kremer has remained fresh and hasn’t formed a skin, as is often the case for jar-ed paint.
RGH makes decent paint. Their affordable prices make them a good value. Not only that, you can select the oil type when ordering white (they have a nice variety of whites, including the all-important flake). For someone, like me, who prefers cold-pressed linseed, this is compelling. As far as I know, RGH is the only producer with this smart feature.
But some of their colors, including large-sized whites, are only available in jars. Cheap jars. Paint in jars (or cans) tends to form a skin. When the skin gets into the mass of paint, it ruins it. Removing the skin is tedious, time consuming, and wasteful. The only way to get rid of the skin is to remove a lot of paint. Knowing this, I spray water over the surface of the paint when sealing the jars. But a 250ml jar of cremnitz white formed a skin anyway. In spite of my best efforts, I didn’t get rid of all the skin and now it’s in the body of paint. Half the jar is useless–a $37 waste.
I won’t buy anymore colors available only in jars, which means I won’t buy large sizes of flake white from RGH until they change their policy.
By the way, the only producer of jar-ed paint I’ve had success with is Kremer and they use glass jars.
One of my pet peeves is subpar or crappy material marketed to artists at boutique prices. I will swallow hard and pay premium prices for premium material, but too often I end up paying top-dollar for unusable junk. The art supply market is chockablock will hucksters, con artists, and amateurs. Many producers simply do not know…
I spent the past the several days drawing. Yesterday I started drawing on 2 new canvases: Euclid Avenue (48″ x 60″), and Sunday (42″ x 56″). The day before, I started the 40″ x 50″ Girl in Purple Boots. This furious drawing is, in part, the result of a screw-up. Several days back I started another 42″ x 56″ canvas called Watch. But it was a struggle. The surface wasn’t right–it wasn’t coming together. The next day, hoping that a fresh start would rectify things, was just as bad. Then it dawned on me: I selected the wrong-sized canvas. I was unsuccessfully trying to shoehorn my worked-out design into the wrong size and scale. No wonder it wasn’t coming together. The design was intended for a 48″ x 60″ canvas. Duh.
I played with redesigning it but didn’t like the results. So I wiped off the drawing and put another ground on the canvas–I didn’t like the surface anyway. Although I really like the design for Watch, I decided to put it aside for awhile, and used the larger canvas for Euclid Avenue instead. I am putting the finishing touches on several other 48″ x 60″ canvases today and Watch will have to wait until those surfaces are ready.
Status
Tom Hudson
I use burnt sienna as the basis of my flesh tones, so I use a lot of burnt sienna. My favorite brand for this color is Natural Pigments’ French Burnt Sienna. Some burnt siennas are too red, like Winsor Newton’s. Old Holland’s is excellent–both light and dark. But Natural Pigments’ is just right: not too red, not too dark–just right.
I had several sessions with this painting, Dinner in Trenton, over the past few days. It was the first opportunity to use my new Terkell flats; first-rate brushes–and affordability priced. How many more sessions? Hard to say. Working on a large painting (Dinner in Trenton is 42″ x 56″) is a series of calculations. It’s easy to make…
Winsor Newton has become my choice for mid-range oil paint, supplanting RGH. While not Old Holland, W & N’s quality is consistently high, and I prefer some of their colors over all competing brands, such as madder lake and cadmium scarlet. I like RGH’s cold-pressed, lead-based whites but their tubes are cheap and prone to break and leak. This is a serious problem for large-size tubes.
