oil paints, help??????????????
Keith
Hello fellow artists out there, listen, l am chasing a full range of
good oil paints at the best possible price, oil paints seem ridiculously
priced here in Australia, hopefully someone can steer me in the right
direction. I've previously used rowney and winsor and newton, but not
having painted for a couple of years, l'm open to suggestion??
warm regards Keith
Stanley Beck
You might want to try a test with a tube or Yarka (a Russian import) if
it is available. I haven't tried it, but they seem to beat everybody's
price, and I believe the Russians treat their arts seriously. It's been
showing up in the U.S. lately, and the prices are pretty attractive.
Regards,
--
Stanley Beck
Online Gallery --> http://members.aol.com/sbeckart/index.htm
Info --> mailto:sbec...@aol.com, mailto:sbec...@earthlink.net
Charles Eicher
> Keith wrote:
> >
> > Hello fellow artists out there, listen, l am chasing a full range of
> > good oil paints at the best possible price, oil paints seem ridiculously
> > priced here in Australia, hopefully someone can steer me in the right
> > direction. I've previously used rowney and winsor and newton, but not
> > having painted for a couple of years, l'm open to suggestion??
> >
> > warm regards Keith
>
>
> You might want to try a test with a tube or Yarka (a Russian import) if
> it is available. I haven't tried it, but they seem to beat everybody's
> price, and I believe the Russians treat their arts seriously. It's been
> showing up in the U.S. lately, and the prices are pretty attractive.
Is that so? I know one fellow who goes to Russia regularly, he always takes
tubes of oil paint with him, and trades them for paintings. His russian
painter friends are always bitching that it is impossible to get good
quality paint. He says he can get a painting worth hundreds of dollars, for
just a couple $10 tubes of paint. I dunno, maybe he exaggerates..
This question pops up regularly, here and in rec.arts.fine.. I have never
regretted following a simple advice, that you should use the best quality
paints you can afford. And there have been times I had to decide between
being able to afford food vs. paints.
Using really low grade paints is no economy. They work differently, and the
results are IMHO, pretty bad. Yarka is a pretty low grade paint. Let me
give a specific example. I recently found a cache of old oil paints that I
had put away for nearly 15 years. They were all Windsor and Newton artists
grade. I opened them up, and they were all in perfect condition, even after
sitting for all that time. Some of the tubes were half-used, and some had
punctures. Even the worst damaged tubes only had a little drying around the
puncture. I am still using them now. BUT.. I had some cheapo Brea paints, I
put one half-used tube of black away for a couple of months, sealed, no
punctures, and it turned solid. This should give some idea of the
difference in the quality of the binders used in manufacturing these
paints. High quality paints are finer ground, and have finer binders. A
tube of artists grade paint has more tinting power than a tube of student
grade paints. This is even true of fine and extra fine grades. I started
fooling with more expensive extra fine paints, the tinting power is truly
astonishing, you ought to see how much white it takes to dilute an extra
fine grade of pthalo blue, for example. You might actually use less paint,
and end up paying less in the long run. And you'll be painting with better
materials and get better results, depending on your technique.. Of course,
if you like to put on thick paint like cake frosting, any old cheap crap
will be fine.
Anyway, in the specific case of the Australian, I'd suggest he investigate
Japanese pigments like Holbein. I was surprised how cheap they were when I
was in Japan, artists fine quality Holbein was cheaper in Japan than
student grade W&N is here in the US (and I was buying when the US
dollar/Yen exchagne rate wasn't really that good). I bet Holbein is a lot
cheaper to import than american made products, in australia. And they are
particularly good quality too (one of my favorites). I am sure there are
other brands, but I'm mostly familiar with them as watercolors (sakura,
etc). Check around..
| Charles Eicher |
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