Colors & Thinners

Painting tubes | Spirits & Oils

With the brushes, the painting tubes will be the most consequent part of your budget (especially if you paint with oil).

In the shops, you will find boxes of painting with very traditional nuances which generally adapt to the basic pallet of the painters amateurs and professionals. The tubes of colors are available in format 20mL, 60mL and 150mL.

Here are some types that you can find at the specialized retailers such as :

For the watercolors, the boxes you will find will contain integrated cups, brushes and even sponges. The gouache exists in tube but also in fluid pencil such as "correctors".

Spirits & Oils | Painting tubes

Oils and spirits are part of the same group of materials.
There are two classes of oils :
The fix oils (linseed oil and nuts oil) and the essential oils obtained by distillation (spirits). 

Essential oils | Fix oils

When in contact with the air, the essential oils (or spirits) totally disappear by volatization. In painting, whatever if their origin is vegetal, such as the aspic spirit, or mineral such as petroleum spirit, they constitute volatile thinners

¶   You must use them very quickly if you don't want to recreate your mixtures and so take the risk to miss the right tint.

The « vegetal spirits »usable in oil painting are obtained by distillation, either directly extracted from various plants, such as the lavender (aspic spirit), or from the gem produced by some conifers like the maritime pine (turpentine spirit).

The « Mineral spirits » used for the same goal are all derived from petroleum, and all different when analyzing their purity more or less important, or their degree of volatility.

Vegetal spirits

Turpentine spirit adjusted
Mix to the usual colors, the turpentine spirit generates a very pleasant paste but that quickly becomes draft. It's mainly used for the rough sketch and the general concepts of the work. Only for special cases where you want to work a long time on your painting, you could partially use less volatile spirit.
It's generally used to clean your oil painting materials because it dissolves the fat bodies.

Aspic spirit
Aspic spirit comes from the distillation of the male lavender flowered heads. It's less volatile than the turpentine spirit, but also more expensive. That's why we recommend it more for the sewing up than for a common use.
The result of its mix with the painting is a very smooth paste. When you use it you avoid the small undesired packs of painting on your brush.

¶   These spirits, by nature, come back to a resin state when a contact with the air. We call fat spirit a vegetal sprit that became a resin, or that has been oxidized, due to a too slow evaporation (when we forget, for example, a certain quantity of turpentine spirit in the bottom of an uncovered waste oil cup, this spirit becomes sticky after couple of days).
When this evaporation is pure and rapid, the oiling does not happen (when the spirit is mixed to a color). We recommend so to well keep the vegetal spirits in very airtight bottle. The waste oil cup that have contained these kind of spirits inside must be cleaned after each working day.

¶   Just for checking, in order to be sure about its freshness, you can put one or two drops on a sheet of paper. 24 hours later, you should not have any left trace.

Mineral spirits

Petroleum spirit
It completely evaporates. Its volatility degree is constant and it's almost odorless. Petroleum spirit is specially distilled for oil painting. Turpentine spirit allergic artists are using it because it's safe. Thanks to its penetration power, it goes deeply through the paint.

Essential petroleum oil
By nature, this mineral oil is closer to a spirit than to a spirit even if it's categorized there. Its particularities are :
• Creamy under the brush, when using it, this spirit does not introduced any non-volatile substance in the paste and so let the canvas without any trace after evaporation. Less light than the petroleum spirit, it better preserves the freshness of the paste and allows to work for a very long time.
• Despite the easiness it's procures when using it, you ought to use it very carefully, thinking about the fact that the paint mixed with it will be lighter and less rich after drying than what it seemed to be under your brush.

¶   You will be able to use the oils or spirits if you want to get a mat rendering. But be careful, the more you thin down your paint with this kind of spirits, the more the paint will be fragile.

¶   To clean your brushes containing fresh paints, the petroleum spirit is the best product (except the soap) because it doesn't dry or erase like the turpentine spirit.
To clean your brushes containing vanishes, you should use the thinner of this vanish.
If the vanish or the colors are already dry, the action of these products will be insufficient. You will then use the liquid to clean your brushes.

Fix oils | Essential oils

The fix oils never vanish. In contact with the air, they can, like the olive or groundnut oil, remain fluid (non-siccative oils).

Some others called siccatives step by step become solid (linseed or poppy seed oil) and are specifically used as linker to crush the oil colors.

Cleared linseed oil
The linseed oil is extracted from grilled linseed by simple compressions. Linseed oil is the most siccative and strenghest of the painting oils. However it yellows when drying. Because of that, it is generally used for the crush of the darkest colors of the palette, or the less siccative (ex: Ivory black).
The cleared linseed oil has the best quality among the linseed oils that has been taken out from the air and is extremely transparent. Nevertheless, it becomes yellow…

Faded linseed oil
To well distinguish from the cleared linseed oil (natural treatment), this oil is obtained by an artificial treatment that uses the absorbing reaction of some natural grounds. This oil becomes both pure and slightly yellow.

Polymerized linseed oil
The term cooked oil is a little bit confusing because in the shops we use this term for oils containing a certain quantity of metallic salts (plumb oxide, manganese) dedicated to accelerate the drying operation. The polymerized Lefranc & Bourgeois oil doesn't contain any metallic oxide.
After drying, you get a very beautiful flexible and strong film, that doesn't yellow a lot.

¶   Be careful if you use a linseed oil because its high viscosity needs to cut it with other oils.

Black oil
The black oil is pure walnut oil, cooked with yellow plumb oxide. It is the safest siccative. The black oil, added to crushed colors, enhances the paste and deeply dries them. If you add 2 or 3 volumes of turpentine, you will get the best mixture to sketch a painting.
The drying operation is fast (only several hours) and without craquelure.

Poppy seed oil
Extracted from poppy seed, it is less siccative than the linseed oil and turns less to yellow when drying. That's why we like to use it to crush the light colors of the palette.