Painting outside in the cold spring weather

Your paints will work fine; you just need to dress properly.

Deer in snow, by Carol L. Douglas. I included this because I hit one on Saturday. She bounded off, but she's gonna have a headache.

Normally, plein air students take it easy in the dead of winter, but not my current class. They’ve trooped faithfully to my studio through the worst weather. It’s still five days until Spring, but they’re all anxious to get outdoors.

Uninsulated spaces are pretty common in Maine, where the houses are attached to barns and sheds. One of my students has his studio in one of these outbuildings. In summer, it’s delightful, but in the dead of winter he switches to watercolor so he can work in his kitchen. Now that it’s warming up again, he wants to get back to oils, but even with a woodstove, he’s unlikely to raise the temperature much above the low forties. “Do you have any tips for me?” he asked.

Upper Reaches of the Pecos River, by Carol L. Douglas

It’s actually easier to stay warm outside, as long as the wind isn’t blowing. Even an overcast day will have some solar gain, whereas an unheated barn can get pretty damp and cold.

The most important part of your body to insulate is your feet. Standing in one place is far more taxing than walking around in the cold. A piece of carpeting on the ground or floor will help. Always wear insulated snow boots or snowmobile boats. Don’t have them? Get some oversize Wellies and several pairs of wool socks. Yes, you’ll waddle, but agility isn’t the issue here; insulation is. (This is a "do as I say, not as I do," statement. I'm always going out in the wrong boots.)

I wear nitrile-palm fishing gloves to paint. They’re warm enough for all but the worst days, when I add a chemical hand warmer. And dress in layers, as you would for any winter activity.

If you're working in pastel, you have no material-handling problems at all.

Will your paint work? Yes!

I regularly store my palettes outdoors in wintertime. I can pull them out of the snowdrift (assuming I can find them) and start painting immediately. Oil paints in a linseed oil binder don’t freeze until they reach -4.27° F or -20.15° C.

Even when we get below that point, oil paint seems to thaw with no problems. The oil binder doesn’t change color, viscosity or clarity, and nothing separates.

Haybales, Niagara County, by Carol L.Douglas. This was painted at -10° F., and the lumps are frozen paint. In addition, my cell-phone battery and my car battery both died from the cold. I must have been crazy.

In the summer, I move my palettes to a freezer. Most home freezers are set at about 0° F, so the paint is very chilled but not actually frozen. The cold temperatures slow down oxidation, which makes the paint stay open longer. (I had a dedicated chest freezer for my paints, but my husband insisted on filling it up with food. Now I keep my palette in a waterproof stuff sack so that it doesn’t contaminate our future dinners.)

As long as you’re above -4.27° F, your paints will work more or less normally. They may get slightly thick as you get close to 0°; just increase the amount of solvent very slightly and they’ll be fine.

Twilight on my stone wall, by Carol L. Douglas

If you use watercolor, you can add grain-alcohol, vodka or gin as antifreeze. A good rule of thumb is that you can add up to 20% booze to your paints before they get tipsy. But not all pigments can handle their liquor. Be prepared for excess paper staining, or different precipitation rates than you’re used to with plain water.

I know of no way, sadly, to keep acrylics from freezing. 

With any medium, you’re unlikely to have precise control of your brushes when you’re bundled up and your hands are in gloves. Work loose and don’t sweat the details.

There's nothing new under the sun, and that includes glazing

Is it true that the fat-over-lean rule is suspended when using alkyd paints and mediums?

Grain Elevators, by Carol L. Douglas, is an example of a cold-wax medium painting. I used it to add the rough texture of a beaten down industrial setting to the sky.

 Oil paints are pigments suspended in vegetable oil. These drying oils are most commonly linseed oil but also may be walnut oil or tung, poppy, or perilla seed oils. They do not dry by evaporation, but by oxidation. To speed up the drying process, metal salts are sometimes added. 

In my youth, we made our own medium with equal parts linseed oil, turpentine, damar varnish and a few drops of cobalt drier. After seeing the condition of some 20^th century masterpieces, cracked and brittle after less than a century, I stopped making my own and started to use commercially-prepared medium instead.

Alkyd mediums have almost completely taken over the industrial coating world. They dry more quickly than old-fashioned drying oils. There are many ways to make an alkyd medium, but they all involve cooking a vegetable oil with a polyol like glycerine. Before you consider eating the results, however, alkyds generally have Xylene added to control the viscosity. Alkyds for decorative painting have extra oil cooked in to lengthen the oil strands and to make a more durable finish.

The Sacrifice of Isaac, c. 1527, by Andrea del Sarto, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows a painting at the pre-glaze point.

I’m seeing more and more students come to class with alkyd-based products like Galkyd or Liquin. I’ve used both and like them well enough; they don’t feel significantly different from conventional media. But I’m skeptical of replacing something proven with something unproven to save dry time, which is relatively unimportant in alla prima painting. Classic painting mediums last for centuries when properly applied.

It’s claimed by some teachers that alkyd media allow you to ignore the fat-over-lean rule in painting. That’s the principle that higher-oil paints (i.e., mixed with medium) belong on the top levels, whereas lower-oil mixes (i.e. cut with turpentine or OMS) belong in the initial underpainting. 

The Sacrifice of Isaac, c. 1522, by Andrea del Sarto, courtesy of the Prado, shows the same subject in what del Sarto would have called its finished form, after meticulous glazing.

Pigments affect the dry time of paints as much as the oil binder does. However, as a general rule, the more oil, the longer it takes for paint to dry. The less oil, the faster the paint dries, but this produces a more brittle film. That’s one reaason we use thin layers at the bottom and save the juicy paint for the top.

There’s been a trend toward painting techniques using glazing layer after glazing layer of thin pigment dissolved in alkyd media. I’ve even seen paintings done by laying down layers of alkyd medium and then painting into that. None of that is proven technology, and won’t be in our lifetimes. It will take another few generations before the durability of indiscriminate alkyd glazing is proved.

Self-portrait, c. 1655, Rembrandt van Rijn, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum. His technique involved painting impasto passages above transparent ones, or the opposite of glazing.

Glazing has been used since oil painting was invented. It was traditionally done by applying transparent colors over an opaque monochromatic grisaille or colored foundation. That doesn’t mean the masters just indiscriminately glazed everything. Most passages were painted alla prima, just as we do today. Glazing was restricted to dynamic passages and fine modulations.

To do it right is very tricky; I’ve never mastered it. It’s hard to predict how a passage will look when dry. You get no second try at the underpainting, so if it’s wrong, too bad. And the thickness of the glaze affects not only the paint’s tonal value, but its surface finish.

Still, pigment suspended in a binder is very beautiful. If you’re interested in this effect, you might try cold-wax medium instead. Unlike encaustic, which uses heat to thin the wax, cold-wax medium is whipped with mineral spirits. It has a milky, soft, appearance. You can sand it, scrape it, and rework it to your heart’s content, and it’s thoroughly modern in its final appearance.