Langridge

Wallace Seymour - I've tried their excellent Manganese Blue, a welcome return of a pigment you couldn't get in its pure form in recent years; and their Flake White substitute - the white takes a lot of getting used to; it's very thick... near to the appearance of genuine Flake White, but very oily - next time I use it, I think I might squeeze some onto a paper towel, to absorb some of the oil.  They make a Lowry White, too - pleasanter to use, and an interesting variant.  It's (expensive!) fun to try all these different brands - alongside some of the old favourites. I did think, in my fetching, boyish innocence, that the heavy metal colours wouldn't be very different between brands: wrong, I was!  The Michael Harding Cobalt Blue was a total revelation - it is expensive, but it's such a fabulous colour, with a strength that other Cobalts often lack.  I've been watching the video demos of the painter Andrew Barrowman on YouTube (Dr Bulgin - get him to write an article for The Artist!) and notice he uses a range of different brands - Michael Harding, Winsor and Newton, Langridge, and probably others; he's taken to using Michael Harding's Warm White, in substitution for Flake - seems to suit him well, and it looks to be far less oily than the Wallace Seymour version.  So that's the one next on my list - because while I've stockpiled lead whites, I want to use them carefully and abstemiously; they should last me until I'm 90, but what if I live longer than that?   I'd buy the Langridge Caput Mortuum shown above, by the way, just for its wonderful name.

Flake White is (was) a lead-based paint, which is warmer than Titanium - which can be alarmingly white, and is also a notoriously slow dryer: lead whites dry far more quickly.  They mix better with colours, too - obviously, depending on a lot of different circumstances; but on the whole they don't swamp mixes or make them look chalky, which is a problem with Titanium....... Plus, the lead whites - Flake, Cremnitz, Flemish, Stack - have an inherent strength: they make good, strong paintings that stand the test of time, and they're stringy enough, firm enough in extended brush-strokes, to enable the techniques of the old masters, eg, in painting lace, and ruffs, various kinds of intricate costumes: granted, very few of us are ever going to need to paint a cavalier's lace collar, so it's not necessarily a huge loss.  All the same - you like to think you could, if you had to...  Rembrandt would have struggled if he'd been restricted to Titanium White (which he wasn't, because it didn't exist at the time, but you get the point...) Finally - Lucien Freud's portraits and figure studies were invariably painted with Cremnitz White or Flake; it enabled him to get subtle flesh tones, greater control over how brush-strokes were placed, passages that would dry relatively fast so that he could work over them, with glazes or further opaque touches.  He was better off than I am, so bought up a big stock of lead whites which still exists somewhere - inspiring me to take up burglary, except I don't know where it is. Glazes - transparent veils of colour, over a usually lighter base; can be applied with fingers, dry brush, or made to move about a bit with a little oil or Liquin; will crack if you use too much oil over an oily base (don't use Turps for this). As to the "why" of glazing - to be honest, I rarely do it in oil, though quite often do it in acrylic: at its best, it can give a subtle, jewel-like effect to your paintings, help with modelling forms, add a richness, modify a colour without having to scrape things off and start again - e.g. a red over a too bright green.  Your base colour needs to be dry, though, or you just get a mix - a direct mix, rather than the optical mix glazing can give.  The Impressionists probably wouldn't have glazed very often, whereas Rembrandt certainly did. Other artists are available....  But broadly, the very direct painters have tended to avoid glazing, the gradual builders-up of layers used and use it frequently.  

I’ve got Wallace Seymour Caput Mortuum Deep -  Fabulous colour! Series 1 so not expensive! Caput Mortuum Deep PR 101