Ballinger - Painting Boats and Harbors

ALTHOUGH I HAVE PAINTED a great many watercolors in my life, I still consider oils a much easier and more flexible medium in which to work. The instructions in this book will be based on painting in oil, and I will try to give you all the information at my disposal to help you handle this medium in a professional manner.

Some artists and many students think that they have to paint in watercolors for years before they acquire sufficient skill to work in oils. This assumption has always seemed absurd to me, for there is no medium as easy to work in as oil. You can make changes and repaint the picture with the greatest of ease if you are using oil, while in watercolor you are in trouble if a single wash goes wrong.

Painting in oil isnt like drawing with a pencil. Your brush strokes should be broad and strong, so accustom yourself to working on a fairly large scale from the start.

For the benefit of those who have had no previous experience with oil painting, I will list the necessary equipment for out-of-door painting.

You will need a sketchbox to carry your brushes and paints. A wooden box 12 x 16 inches is a good size, although you can use a 16 x 20 inch box if you prefer a more generous one. Sketchboxes are usually made of wood, though some people prefer those of aluminum because of their light weight. A smaller sketchbox is easier to carry, but I think one does better with a fairly generous size.

A palette comes with the sketchbox, though some artists like to use a paper palette with disposable sheets. If you use a wooden palette it is a good idea to rub a little linseed oil on it, when new, in order to give it a smoother and less porous surface on which to mix your paint.

Dont buy a fitted box. It contains a lot of useless colors and is much too expensive.

You will want a good, solid sketching easel of either wood or aluminum. My favorite is the Anderson easel, now being manufactured by Edith Anderson Miller in Cincinnati, Ohio. It has a shelflike arrangement below the canvas on which to rest the sketchbox and palette. This easel folds up compactly and has a shoulder strap for carrying. It is a great help when you are wandering around the docks with a sketchbox in one hand and a couple of canvases in the other. Some of the aluminum easels have a similar arrangement. If the easel hasnt a place for a palette, you can nail three stretcher sticks together to fit down over the easel and give you a platform for it.

I never paint while holding the palette in my left hand. It is uncomfortable and, moreover, you need your left hand to hold extra brushes or a paint rag.

I recommend at least six brushes, ranging from a quarter of an inch to an inch in width, and prefer bristle brushes to sable, because you are liable to get your work too polished with sable brushes. These brushes should be flat with a square end, either the type called brights with short bristles or those with slightly longer bristles called flats .

It is a good idea to have two brushes of approximately the same size, one for light color and the other for dark for your smaller ones, Nos. 2 and 3; for the next size, 4 and 5; and for the larger sizes, 7 and 8. For very fine lines you could buy a No. 1 brush, but you will be able to get a fairly fine line by using the side of your larger brushes and will rarely need a small brush. It is better always to use as large a brush as possible in order to cover your canvas rapidly and to keep your picture broad and simple.

You will need a single oil cup about two inches in diameter and a palette knife of the trowel type, with the knife surface a little below the handle. This type of knife is easier to use than the straight type, and you get less paint on your hands ().

The list of colors in the Ballinger Palette is a simple one. It consists of ultramarine blue and cerulean blue, zinc white, cadmium yellow pale, cadmium orange, cadmium red light, cadmium red medium or dark and alizarin crimson. There are no earth colors, greens or black.

These are the colors you will employ most of the time. In addition, you can buy phthalo blue and viridian, though you will seldom use them.

Medium is the liquid you mix with your paint when you apply it to your canvas. I use a combination of linseed oil and turpentine, half and half. The oil should be a purified linseed oil obtainable from any art materials store; any clear gum turpentine sold by paint stores is adequate. You will also need retouching varnish. This is a light, quick-drying varnish to bring a gloss to the parts of the picture that look dull and lifeless. It can be sprayed on by a fixative blower or applied with a clean, soft brush if the painting is dry. You will need only the retouch varnish when the picture dries out and you want to continue painting on it.