So, flipping channels, I came across one of my favorites: Bob Ross! He’s got his huge pallette loaded with the usual paints, and I am curious. When he’s done with the painting, what happens to all the unused paint?
He’s gotta have a couple ounces of yellow ochre, titanium white, bright red, and Van Dyke brown each on that pallette. Does he scrape up the unused stuff and put it back in the jar?
Tripler
I am not very artistic. I seriously don’t know.
He is well aware of the cost of paint, but that they the tints he knows he will need.
The painting he is working on needed those tints.
Google it.
Google, images, “bob ross painting”.
Look at each photo that shows his pallette and the painting he is working on.
You will see they MATCH.
Um, huh?
The apparently unused globs of colors. The ones that weren’t mixed for tints. The stuff that didn’t go on the canvas. . . does that just get rinsed down the drain?
Tripler
A happy little question.
Down the drain. Ever tried to put toothpaste back in the tube?
Or, as Gacy said, “Can’t stop painting… clowns will eat me…”
aren’t some colors put there so you use some to mix some tints on the fly?
How fast do oils dry out? Could you conceivably cover the palette with a piece of plastic and start back up the next day?
When did paints begin to come in tubes instead of, I guess, jars? I can’t imagine Rembrandt or Michelangelo had paint in tubes. I also expect paint was relatively more expensive back then. Did they save their paint into jars or whatever?
Artist here. Oil paints take a long time to dry, especially a big blob, so you would use that same set of colors for the next painting. If it were going to be a while before you started the next painting, you could cover the palette with plastic wrap to keep the paint fresh longer. We are talking days and weeks here.
Artists have favorite colors that they use to mix everything else, with variations depending on the subject of the painting. They are likely to put the same paints on their palette every time. Even put them in the same positions on the palette, maybe.
Some palettes have a paper lining you can throw away. I used glass for a palette in my college classes. You can clean glass by scraping the dry paint off with a razor blade.
You do not want to put oil paint down the drain or you will clog the drain. The paints are thick and not water soluble.Lots of pigments are bad for the environment, too, so you want to keep them out of drains. If you have paint you need to get rid of, you use a palette knife and scrape it into the trash. Oil painting is messy. Expensive, too, so mostly you use the paint on the next painting.
Bob Ross painted in oils – these take months, even years to fully dry (there was a piece in the paper a while back about some 16th century oil painting that still hadn’t dried completely). For a daily painter like Ross, just putting the palette aside would be fine for a few days.
For a longer time (maybe a few weeks), you can mix a little oil (linseed, maple, a few others) into the paint to “rejuvenate” it. Longer than that and you’d throw it away. In general, most painters seem to dole out the paints in relatively small amounts – Ross was probably using larger blobs to make the camera pick up on them easier (also, he was selling the paints, so if his viewers happened to use more…). Cleanup of oils generally requires pretty nasty solvents or expensive oils, so there’s an incentive to minimize it. (Ross also used a particular technique that tended toward large brushes and palette knives, so he’d also need larger pools of paint.)
For acrylic paints, the same technique doesn’t work: slow painters (say…me) generally need to keep a spritzer bottle around to keep the paint moist even long enough to finish painting with. For storage, they make special sealed boxes (with moist sponges in them) to keep the palette in – even that’s only good for a few days. On the other hand, acrylic paints are much cheaper than oils, so the cost of waste would be lower. Acrylics clean up with water if they’re wet, and flake off if they’re not.
Historically speaking, of course, (oil) paints were kept in paint pots, generally ceramics with right fitting corks or stoppers, and there’d be no trouble transferring leftover paint back to the container (or to a mixed color container).
Modern technology has also given us my personal favorite: water soluble oil paints. These have all the advantages of oil paint (slow drying, easy mixing, lasting color), but with a “soap” molecule embedded, so they can be thinned or cleaned with water instead of paint thinner or oil. They’re somewhere in the middle, waste-wise: palettes of them are good for about three days uncovered; after that you’ll need to add either water or oil to rejuvenate them. They’re wasted after a week or so. If you keep them in the humid palette-keepers, they’ll get soft and runny in a matter of hours, so you only make that mistake once…or twice.
I believe they made their paints by mixing powders with oil.
Interesting! Thank you ScaryJane and TimeWinder (and everyone else!). My only experiences with paint wew either the retail sales of it, or the application of it onto houses. Never did do any work with the artistic paints. But thats interesting to hear it took days to weeks on the pallette. How do artists keep their canvassesfrom smearing or bleeding after they’re finished with the painting?
Tripler
Color me enlightened.
Speaking for myself, I often don’t. But oil paints are pretty thick, they’ll stay in place once you’ve applied them, as long as you’re more careful than I am about not touching them or dropping/jarring the canvas. Acrylics dry fast enough it’s not usually a problem.
Remember those little plastic canisters that 35mm film came in? If I don’t need very much of a color I mix it in one of those canisters. I mark on it exactly what colors went into the mix, in case I need to match it someday. The lid is virtually air-tight, so the paint remains at the correct consistency for a long time. I have all the canisters lined up in order on a shelf in my studio. When I need a new color, the new canister gets added to the others, and I currently have a few hundred of them.
I don’t even remember the last time I used a conventional palette.
They may also have had apprentices, whose job was to do the laborious grinding and mixing.
Some die-hard artists still do this(**Little Nemo’s **link is a modern Internet site selling the stuff), and of course that’s still where most paints come from (done industrially). I’ve also heard, but never tried myself, that you can basically kiln-heat old, dried paint, then grind it into powder, and re-mix with oil to get a much poorer (but very, very cheap, for apprentices) “second paint.” (Basically using old paint “powder” as the pigment to make new.)
This has an analogue in a slightly related modern field: inkjet printers. There are two types of ink in modern use: dyes, which are cheap and easy to produce, but tend to be easily diluted and wash out when printed things get wet, and pigments, which are essentially the same technique as above: very small particles of a colored powder suspended in some liquid medium that dries and leaves behind the color. These, like the “paint” that they essentially are, tend to be much more water resistant (but more prone to flaking).
I believe I read somewhere that, interestingly, these pigments are actually often composed of dyed solids - such as finely ground particles of melamine.
When I was in Amsterdam I visited Rembrandt’s house, and bought a jar of red powder that was chemically identical to one of the pigments Rembrandt used. I was looking forward to using this color in a painting that somehow had relevance to Rembrandt. Unfortunately, when my bag was inspected, someone opened the jar and didn’t close it properly. I can vouch for the fact that Rembrandt’s pigments were rather indelible.
Generally, I find all the acrylics on my palette dry together and congeal into a colourful rubbery sheet that is easily peeled off - and makes a nice abstract of its own, if you swing that way…
In the art supply world, when a dye is used as a paint color, an inert pigment is dyed first before mixing with the binder. You’ll see “Lake” after the name. Not too many Lake colors out there anymore, though. They suck and are rarely lightfast.