[Woodcarver] Pigments

[Ivan Whillock]

"Pure" pigments are pure as long as they stay in the container.  They change whenever anything is added to them, whether it is water, oil, eggs, wax, casein, or any of the various vehicles that artists have used down through the ages.

Put several piles of pure pigment on a white sheet of paper.  Add water to one pile, oil to another, wax to another, varnish to another, etc.  Each thing you add will affect the pigment, usually darken it.  When the water evaporates, however, the pigment will lighten up again.  That is one reason why water colors and acrylics lighten as they dry.  The pile with oil in it will not lighten up again, because the oil coagulates and hardens, but doesn't ever leave the mixture.  Thus, oil paints retain the darkened color.  Some artists prefer oil paints for that reason: the color on your palette, the color you paint on the object,  is the color that will always remain.  (With acrylics--and most water media in fact,  that is not true: they lighten as they dry.  That makes matching a new color to one that has dried more difficult with water paints than with oil.)  The wax will deepen the pigment, too, and it will not evaporate away as water does, so the deeper color is likely to remain in that mixture.  In addition, because wax is opaque, it affects the transparency of the color as well, and creates a "satin" look.  (Satin varnish is clear varnish with opacifiers suspended in it to turn it "cloudy."  Keep stirring the satin varnish so they don't settle to the bottom; otherwise, you may end up clear varnish on top.)

The "purest" colors, other than the dry pigment itself,  are those of pastel sticks.   Transparent water colors are pure also, since the water's affect is temporary, they return to the "pure" state of the pigment when the water is gone.  However, if you were to apply a varnish over the colors on a carving, for example, that could, depending on the type of varnish, likely change them, just as the other additives would.  

Different carriers affect the color pigments in different ways, sometimes darkening them, sometimes lightening them, sometimes making them more opaque.  (With gouache, a water color with chalk added to help make it opaque, the dark colors lighten and the light colors darken.) You pick the effect you want for the job you're doing.

Not too many artists fret over whether the colors remain in their pristine state or not, since the process of painting itself "pollutes" them.  If the impurities affect the color's permanence, however, that is a concern.

An amazing variety of binders have been used through the years: eggs (egg tempera) milk (casein paints), oil, water, wax, and a slew of modern chemical agents.  More are being tested all the time.  Recently someone developed an emulsifier to make a water-soluble oil paint--keeping the color consistency of oil yet adding the convenience of water clean-up, etc.  

There are water color pencils, oil pastels, washable crayons (what's the fun of drawing on walls with THEM?), and something just new to me called Aqua Brique.  It's a pastel-like "brick" which you can use to draw directly on the paper as with a pastel.  You can leave it as a pastel or choose to wet it on the paper for water color effects.   You can also pick up the color from the brick with a wet brush like pan watercolors.  You could supplement the "bricks" with water color pencils from the same company and do a variety of tricks with them--broad strokes to fine detail.

There's no end!  If it can be "thunk up" somebody will think of it.

Ivan Whillock Studio
122 NE 1st Avenue
Faribault, MN  55021
Visit my website at
http://www.whillock.com
Visit my Picture Trail album at
http://www.picturetrail.com/gallery/view?username=ivancarve
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