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Oil paintings can be very durable – there are examples available of more than 500 years old. You’d say oil paint is a durable paint. But that’s only the case, when you apply it in a very specific way. Tubes of oil paint are raw ingredients. If you layer them in the wrong way, your painting will crumble and fall apart within a few years after completion. There are roughly three rules, that make an oil painting last the ages.

* paint fat over lean
* paint thick over thin
* always use fresh paint

Fat over lean

The rule “fat over lean” means, that every succeeding layer of oil paint has to be just a little bit fatter than the previous one. In the first layer, you just paint with oil paints right out of the tube, and you make them thinner with turpentine. In the second layer, you add just a little bit of painting medium to the paint. In the third layer, you add a little bit more of medium to the paint etc. Oil painting medium can be made of stand oil and dammar varnish, mixed in equal amounts.

Thick over thin

Thick layers of oil paint take a longer time to dry, then thin layers of paint. The drying process of oil paint doesn’t end when the paint is dry to the touch. And every time you paint a layer over that, it will form a film. Thick film dries more slowly than thin films of oil paint. Faster drying film layers shrink faster than slower drying film layers. So, a thin layer of film painted over a thicker one, will crack in time. In oil painting, it’s better to first work with thinner washes, merely coloring the surface, and add texture later.

Fresh paint

Oil paint forms a film when it dries. It dries in contact with oxygen. When the paint has already been exposed to air for more than a few hours (on your palette), you can still stir it and it seems like you can still paint with it. But it won’t make good film anymore. When oil paint has partly dried, it’s capacity to make one solid film is distorted, and it will peel off in time – long enough to fool you, but not long enough to satisfy the buyer of the painting. If you want to preserve leftovers of paint, meticulously cover them with plastic foil and use them as soon as possible.

There’s a lot more to say about durability. It also depends a lot on the painting grounds you use. Canvas is flexible, and dried gesso is not. Apart from that, there’s no record of the way oil paint behaves after a hundred years on gesso, because gesso is an acrylic material. It has only been there for a few decades. And we all know that acrylic and oil paint are to very different matererials. Even only because of the stiffness, gessoed canvases tend to crack in time.

You can prevent this cracking by gessoing your own canvases and adding some caseine to the gesso (or adding a thin layer of gesso to a ready-primed canvas). Caseine makes the gesso flexible, and it helps the oil paint adhere to the gesso. This is also a good reason to add caseine to the gesso when you prepare a painting board.

When you glue your canvases the oldfashioned way with hide-glue, make sure to use very, very thin glue. A too thick hid-glue layer causes problemes (circle-shaped cracks). The same goes for acrylic binder (not too thick underlayers, only a sizing to impermeate the canvas).

Maybe this is not a very artistic subject. But an expert told me, that most 20 century art will be gone in 50 years, due to bad painting techniques. It will only be available as a digital reproduction… Maybe the real art lover doesn’t mind that the painting he or she bought will crumble while he or she is still alive. But such considerations really are preventable. You can find many stuff about painting in online b2b marketplace.

Source : http://ezinearticles.com

Tags: painting

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