Painter's putty medium

8 x 10” oil on birch

I use A LOT of paint and that means I look for quality, professional paint that doesn’t cost crazy money. So long, Old Holland.

My usual brand is M.Graham oil paint, along with some Gamblin. Both have high pigment loads and, being modern, machine-made paints, both require very little medium straight out of the tube. Gamblin is a bit stiffer but not sculptural or varied in any way. And it’s this lack of variety that sometimes bores me, especially for small paintings which rely so much more on an attractive paint surface for their impact.

Large paintings have big spaces in which colour variety, interesting edges, and varied brushwork draw the eye, but small paintings have to work hard to hold a viewer’s attention.

Traditional, handmade pigments that you see in paintings in museums, had variety in pigment size and consistency. The artists also used lead white which is a very sculptural thing - snotty and ropy - as well as being highly toxic. So the paintings on museum walls have more surface character than what modern paint will make straight out of the tube.

Gels, impasto mediums, glazing mediums, and others, added to pigment, can make oil painting surfaces more interesting, but modern mediums usually have added alkyd resin which makes them quick drying, shiny, and, in my experience, very hard to clean out of brushes. I tend to avoid them because I spend too much on brushes to see them rendered useless because of build up at the ferrule. (There’s a theme here: the frugal painter. But aren’t we all looking to avoid unnecessary expenses?)

Luckily, a friend sent me this Sadie Valeri Instagram video about making a non-alkyd, traditional oil painting medium:

sadievaleri

A post shared by @sadievaleri

Chalk or marble dust mixed with drying oil makes a bulking agent that can be safely added to oil paint. Depending on the volume of dust added, the medium can be soft or very stiff. The important thing is to make sure that the dust is completely incorporated into the mixture before adding it to the paint.

I bought a muller for this thorough mixing. It’s a tool I’ve lusted after for ages but they tend to be expensive and I didn’t actually have a reason to own one:) This one is reasonably priced and works perfectly.

Blending first with a palette knife, and then finishing by grinding with the muller ensured thorough mixing. I made enough to put some into a tightly sealed container for future use. Ta da! A medium that changes the surface quality of the paint without ruining my brushes.

As Sadie notes, it’s best for high key colours because it dramatically lightens darks. Who wants textural darks, anyway? They’re not appealing to look at, but a bulky, sculptural light or mid is a thing of beauty to me.

So this little painting on birch is made with added painter’s putty. The colours are muted both because of the putty and because of the limited, low-chroma palette that I used: Paynes grey, yellow ochre, and a mixture of terra rosa and burnt sienna for my red. I wanted the cleaner, more delicate red of terra rosa, but the value of burnt sienna so I premixed a pile of these 2 before starting. I like the sense of atmosphere and glare and the visible brush marks.

The putty is an inexpensive and non-toxic medium that doesn’t harden in my brushes so I’m calling this a happy addition to my painting toolkit!

**As an aside, because you’ll be encountering it via the video above, I don’t make the fumed silica gel that Sadie demonstrates. Fumed silica is floaty, uncontrollable stuff that is easily inhaled and lodges in and damages the lungs in the way that asbestos does. I bought it once and threw it away after a single experimental use feeling too nervous about what I was doing to my health in the name of art. Nothing against it, but it’s not for me.

Happy painting!