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Water soluble oils
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Message
Posted
Hi Lorraine, I personally thinks so, they seem to have a nice sheen to them. I prefer them really because I’m such a messy painter and get it all over and ruin brushes etc.. everything cleans up so much better. I’ve not used traditional oils so much.. just some old ones my mum gave me when I was first experimenting with them.
Posted
I think most of them aren't bad in terms of pigment load; and some are quite usefully subtle. But I have a number of problems with them, one of them being that they're so often mis-described. They're not water 'soluble', but water miscible. Water isn't a solvent - they work because they've modified the oil to enable it to be spread with water. Another is that they've not been around long enough to have any confidence in their longevity - which may not matter much if you're just painting for pleasure, but is a concern if you're selling. And finally, they're designed to meet a problem that doesn't really exist - i.e. to avoid the use of solvents. But you can avoid solvents with regular oil paint - a little bit of spirit helps when cleaning up the palette, but it's just as easy to scrape the unused paint off and give the thing a wipe with an oily rag. Dried old paint on your palette doesn't do any harm anyway. And it's not necessary to mix solvents with paint to make it workable - a little Linseed oil will do all you need, working it into the paint with a palette knife (i.e. a REAL palette knife, the rigid ones not a flexible painting knife). So - I don't use them; don't need them; don't have much confidence in them; but I don't think I'd complain over-much about the colours on the whole - some are less vibrant than they might be, even so.
Edited
by Robert Jones
Posted
I’ve not tried them, that’s because I love everything about traditional oil paints and painting with them. From the smell to applying them, be it with a brush or painting knife.
Yes I know oils can be a bit on the messy side, and there are times when I do get plenty of it on me, all part of the fun of painting!
Like Robert, I use as little solvent as possible, it’s not needed, a little gel painting medium is useful, although I’m not sure of what that consists of.
However, it is fairly popular, although I don’t know of any professional artists who use it, this might tell you something!
Edited
by Alan Bickley
Posted
I have used water soluble oils on this painting of sunflowers that I completed last week, its dry to the touch, the colours are vibrant and its on a 10 x 10 boxed canvas. On this one I have used Artisan Fast Drying Liquid and found it leaves a lovely sheen to the finished painting. I know you can mix water with them but I prefer to dilute where needed with Artisan Linseed Oil or with the Fast drying one. Linda
Posted
Hi Lorraine,
I am also looking into moving to oil and the big thing for preventing me using Oil was the smell and the drying time. Having small children and oil paint was not an option, however, kids grow up and so I am looking at this as a new medium again. I found this link from Will Kemp to be very useful https://willkempartschool.com/water-mixable-oils-vs-traditional-oils-for-solvent-free-oil-painting/ this certainly shows a difference between them, but he does not slate them.
Looking at the Winsor and Newton permanence tables, traditional artists oil paint using burnt umber for example is lightfastness 1 and Extremely permanent- in other words Artists can consider this to be pretty much staying as they intended in the future. Artisan oils have the permanence rating but have not yet been tested by the American Society for testing materials (ASTM) for lightfastness, therefore I checked the Jackson's website the only water mixable oils that say they are lightfast, though not giving a rating from ASTM, are Talens Cobra, or Jackson's own brand, but not ASTM rated. Daler Rowney Georgian water mixable oils are giving a 4* permanence rating, but not comparing it on the ASTM scale. If you are considering selling your work, then lightfastness of colour is a big consideration and one that has made me think that water mixable oil is not for me at the moment and I will stick with acrylic.
Having seen the Will Kemp test, if you are not considering selling work, using the Artisan range with the mediums rather than water, looks like a great idea if you cannot use traditional oils.
Edited
by Mark Cope
Posted
The smell of oil paint comes mostly - though not entirely - from the solvents many use with them, e.g. White Spirit, or Turpentine; Low Odour thinners are also not without odour, and usually gave me a sore throat. So - I stopped using them. All I normally use now is Linseed oil, and I doubt that the whiff is any worse - or necessarily any better - than water miscible oils. If you can use the Artisan paints, you can use regular oils - and don't forget, you can use alkyds, too.
Posted
Not really - unless I'm weird too (actually, that's entirely probable). I like the smell of turpentine - which of all the solvents is somewhat better for the paint than the alternatives, though probably the worst for human health - and, less so, of Linseed oil .... nice, fat, globules of oil, oh yes!
The honk on which I am less than keen is that produced by Liquin - there are other alkyd gels, and I must get around to trying one of them to discover if they smell any better.
And when it was available, genuine copal oil medium - there are still products labelled 'copal oil', but they're not real copal - very distinctive smell, and pleasant to use. Though even if it were still available, I wouldn't use it now - and certainly not the products which claim to replicate it. (Because it, and they, darken paint over time.)
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