Advice on Colours

The surprising this about this is that van Gogh paints are supposed to be the cheaper version of the Talens Rembrandt range - of which I think highly; in oil and watercolour, they have vibrancy.  I've not tried the van Gogh - clearly, I should.  Though please whip the Zinc out of it.  

I’ve got a fair few of the Rembrandt range and they are very good, however, at a price of course! Probably on a par with Old Holland, W&N Artist’s’ range and at a push Michael Harding… at a push I said! There is quite a difference between the Rembrandt and van Gogh range, the Rembrandt gives better coverage which is obvious - but don’t discount the cheaper one, it does a great job in the right hands…

As a relative newcomer to painting, I can't say much about drying times but, in answer to your question  regarding thinners, there are non toxic alternatives that seem to work well. Being asthmatic, I'm averse to using turpentine. My choice is for the "Zest It" brand. Their products are citrus based which gives them ( to me at least) a pleasant odour. I have used their paint thinner and brush cleaner which has worked well for underpainting and it does clean brushes. Their medium is said to speed drying and, whilst I do use it don't have the experience to comment on it's effectiveness it seems to work like linseed oil. 

Taking the questions in idiosyncratic order - such is my way!: there are specific mediums for use with water miscible oils, supplied by the respective manufacturers, eg Winsor & Newton, Cobra, Holbein.  It probably would not be a good idea to use them interchangeably (I can't believe that spelling's right....) because manufacturers are quite secretive about what goes into their water miscible paints, and compatibility between them is probably not guaranteed.  There's a lot we don't yet know about the long-term of water miscible oils: they should be fine - but only time will tell.  If you use regular oils, there are many mediums available - Liquin, Turpentine and Linseed Oil, Linseed Oil on its own, Stand Oil (also known as bodied oil: it's thickened Linseed, either by heating it or exposing it to air); and a good many others.  Personally, I stick to Linseed Oil, a little Stand Oil/Bodied oil, and sometimes regular Linseed OR Stand oil with a portion of Turpentine.  There's also Walnut Oil, and Poppy Oil. If you want a recommendation: I would go for the Linseed Oil, maybe mixed with Turps or Low Odour  Thinners - Linseed is good for the strength of the paint film.  Walnut oil is good for the upper layers, Poppy oil can dramatically lengthen drying times - too dramatically, for my liking. Drying times depend very much on the paint you happen to be using - I have covered this quite extensively in an e-book I wrote (Oil Painting Basics, to be found on the Amazon Kindle store: you don't need a Kindle, just their app); as a rule of thumb, slow dryers include Titanium White, and the Cadmium colours; earth colours - ochres, siennas etc - tend to dry quite quickly, i.e. with a week, or less; a cadmium yellow can take a good two weeks to surface dry, and remains vulnerable to any rough handling for a while thereafter.  Lead whites, which I doubt you'll be using at this stage, but who knows?, are quick dryers and speed the drying of most colours mixed with them - cadmiums are fairly resistant to all attempts to quick dry them, though.  Most blues dry inside a week - I'd be hard put to think of one that didn't, but again, a lot depends on what you mix with it.   I don't have any experiene of Zest-it - I've read about it, and opinions differ so much that I couldn't offer an opinion of my own.  It's bound to be toxic in some degree, because if it were not, it wouldn't work - less so than Turps, and some people just can't bear the smell of Turps: I like it, but it's important only to use it when you have good ventilation, and to put the cap back on the bottle as soon as you can.  It should be stored out of direct sunlight (preferably in the cardboard box the bottle comes in.   A solvent whose smell I can't stand is White Spirit, also known as Mineral Spirits - and it gives me a headache.  So far as mediums go, the only one I really object to on the grounds of its pong is Liquin: it's a good product though, many people use it.   Finally for now - Turps and oil 50:50 is going to give you a very runny mixture; try to keep the Turps to a minimum, around 10% of the oil content.  Linseed is known as a "drying oil", but will retain the richness of the colour - too much Turps will certainly cut drying times, but will also suck the life out of your paint - bear in mind what it is: a solvent; it breaks down the paint rather than extending or enriching it.  Therefore, you don't want a lot of it, most certainly not in the upper layers of your work.   My little e-book is quite cheap, and it will answer many of your questions - I'm always happy to expand upon anything within it on request.

I take your point regarding toxicity Robert. Zest-it paint dilutant and brush cleaner is stated to be non toxic  and non flammable, on the bottle label but their medium does contain a warning. The painting medium contains linseed oil, orange terpene and aliphatic hydrocarbon. Far be it from me, a novice, to recommend it but, it works for me and, perhaps is worth experimenting with. Enough said by me about it for fear of digging a hole too deep to lose the light!

Well, I'll look it out tomorrow: it's on the Amazon Kindle Store, Oil Paint Basics, under my name - so it shouldn't be hard to find, but I will look out the link - towards bedtime, I get stupider: and I've had a rather fraught day, trying to find out how to resize a photograph to the exact size required for my landlord's new driving licence: and then discovering that it's easy to in LibreOffice, whille I was struggling with all sorts of photographic software intended for weightier problems: you'd think it would do the basic stuff as well, wouldn't you.....?  I don't have a Kindle either, I just use the app, which for once can be downloaded to a desktop pc, unlike so many others: I daresay my frustration with technology is beginning to peep through a bit....

Here you go. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Paint-Basics-Robert-Phillip-Jones-ebook/dp/B00B5JYU7O

Bill, your technical knowledge could be very useful here - what I wonder do you think of the safety levels of odourless minimal spirits as compared with genuine Turpentine?  I'm well aware that it's not a good idea to inhale Turps, but my thoughts on it are that at least you can smell it, which tips you off that it's toxic:  better than the odourless spirits which can do bad deeds by stealth, i.e. if we can't smell them we might become blasé about them and progressively less aware of their dangers?  (Now I come to think of it, this might also be true of Zest-it, depending on whatever the solvent is they use in it - a pleasant smell is good, but might it lull us into false security?) On the Amazon kindle app - I thought there was a Mac friendly version, but might well be mistaken.  I keep meaning to get a paper version printed, but it needs formatting properly, which taxes my tech expertise to its very limits.