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Using the Zorn palette for the first time
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Message
Posted
Still having trouble taking photos with my old cameras - did I mention before that Christmas is coming? Damn! Dropping that hint just broke my toe.....
Anyway (no, I'm not really expecting a camera: I'll get around to sorting myself out) for the first time in my painting career, working on a portrait I've used the Zorn palette - slightly modified from the usual recommendations, in that I used Cremnitz White rather than Titanium, but other than that more or less what Mr Zorn used (who actually might well have used a lead white): Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red (Zorn used Vermilion) and Ivory Black. Also the first time I've used black for many years - Lord knows how old my tube of it is, but I'd guess at 35 years.
I can only recommend you to try it - the black and red, and black and yellow, make beautiful, subtle tones and tints and takes an awful lot of faff and fuss out of colour mixing, because if you discipline yourself to do so, you've only got those.
Would I use it for landscapes .... well, who knows; a winter landscape, maybe; possibly even in high summer, when you get those very deep greens; but I doubt that Zorn used it for his landscapes, at least not exclusively.
Have we ever had a Zorn palette portrait contest? Might be time!
Posted
I will be trying the Zorn Palette as I an taking a much more relaxed approach to portraits and trying to overcome the mental block I have about doing them. I was like a robot with a brush, when it came to portraits but the past couple of weeks, I, thought, get a grip, if it goes wrong, so what, I'll start again, so now, I've been totally relaxed and my practising is going much better. When I looked at this post, I had a read up about the artist himself.
Posted
Yes Kenneth, Cremnitz White is lead carbonate, PW 1 - the lead whites differ in subtle ways, but all of them are a lot less chalky and brightly opaque than Titanium White, and more responsive under the brush: which, given their price these days in the UK, and the difficulty in obtaining them, they ought to be.
Denise, I avoided portraiture for years because I just assumed it was too difficult and I couldn't do it: odd, really, because I've always drawn portraits in a variety of media, but an attempt I made at one donkey's years ago got lost in a sea of muddy paint. It was studying the work of Lucien Freud - who also used Cremnitz White, and fearing it would be banned, bought up a huge stash of it, which made me have another go at it, eventually.
You may not want to risk the lead whites - or just find them too hard to track down and too expensive - but if you use Titanium, my advice would be to do so thinly, at least to start with - even squeeze some out on a bit of absorbent kitchen towel, to wick some of the oil away. My portrait went wrong, all those years ago, a) because I was using Titanium White, and too much of it, too soon, and b) that I didn't know how to mix flesh tones, so my unfortunate subject began to resemble the inhuman tones of a ripe plum. The more paint I threw at it, the worse it got. This was very many years ago now, but you can tell the memory still pains me!
The advantage of the Zorn palette - if you stick to it, and don't sneak off to the paint box - is that you can't really throw to many colours at a portrait, because you just haven't got them (or you probably have, but you're keeping the paint box lid firmly shut, having abstracted your black, yellow, and red).
Posted
Yes Kenneth, Cremnitz White is lead carbonate, PW 1 - the lead whites differ in subtle ways, but all of them are a lot less chalky and brightly opaque than Titanium White, and more responsive under the brush: which, given their price these days in the UK, and the difficulty in obtaining them, they ought to be. Denise, I avoided portraiture for years because I just assumed it was too difficult and I couldn't do it: odd, really, because I've always drawn portraits in a variety of media, but an attempt I made at one donkey's years ago got lost in a sea of muddy paint. It was studying the work of Lucien Freud - who also used Cremnitz White, and fearing it would be banned, bought up a huge stash of it, which made me have another go at it, eventually. You may not want to risk the lead whites - or just find them too hard to track down and too expensive - but if you use Titanium, my advice would be to do so thinly, at least to start with - even squeeze some out on a bit of absorbent kitchen towel, to wick some of the oil away. My portrait went wrong, all those years ago, a) because I was using Titanium White, and too much of it, too soon, and b) that I didn't know how to mix flesh tones, so my unfortunate subject began to resemble the inhuman tones of a ripe plum. The more paint I threw at it, the worse it got. This was very many years ago now, but you can tell the memory still pains me! The advantage of the Zorn palette - if you stick to it, and don't sneak off to the paint box - is that you can't really throw to many colours at a portrait, because you just haven't got them (or you probably have, but you're keeping the paint box lid firmly shut, having abstracted your black, yellow, and red).I still have two but wanna know where I can buy them in UK? I know it is difficult to get one, I can’t buy it when I lived in Hong Kong too. But it is easy if you were in Japan and they are very cheap there. For the portrait, we need to stay on the rules more strictly especially if we want the painting looks real. However, oil painting is a medium you can play with thickness. And this is easily overlooked. Silver (lead) white can help. But actually just silver white alone is not enough. I believe old master used calcium carbonate to make the paint more thick. They used it where the highlight is. Nowadays we may use impasto but I stick to calcium carbonate as I can use it to prepare my canvas too.
Posted
I keep reading about the Zorn palette. It hasn't really appealed, because I like lots of bright colours and have no interest in reality colourwise. But it sounds intriguing, so I'll have a go. It'll have to be watercolour or gouache for me...probably gouache. So it's vermilion, ivory black, white and yellow ochre. Don't have vermilion, so it'll be cad red.
Posted
It’s a very “ realist” palette, yes, but personally I like the “ atelier” approach. I like the understated, the “ atmosphere” that this kind of painting has. I like Caravaggio, J Singer Sargent, Rembrandt, and an artist of today- Ewan McClure. Not to say I dismiss the colourful , the wacky and the fun. But, on the whole , realism ( re colour), and in a painterly way, not photographic, is what turns me on.
Posted
I'd not even thought of using the Zorn palette with watercolour or gouache - will have to have a go. What helps it to work in oil is the white - which in watercolour you don't have.... hmm! Interesting experiments to come. There's no theoretical reason that I can think of why it wouldn't work in any opaque medium - other than that gouache, in particular, does have a tendency to bleed - which might help or might not: I don't use gouache very often.
Should work in acrylic, shouldn't it? I'm hesitant because things that work in one medium, which you might think would work in all, don't always work at all. Lots to play with over Christmas, anyway, if I can tear myself away from over-indulgence in foodstuffs and alcohol.
Posted
Michael Harding now has a lead/cremintz white PW1 in his range. Handmade in small batches £70 for a 250ml tube. A worthwhile investment perhaps!Yes, my Crem White is Michael Harding's - I have it ground in Walnut Oil, and in Linseed Oil. The problem is finding a stockist who'll sell it to you without a form-filling rigmarole - some of the older established companies will, but Jacksons and Great Art/Gerstaecker won't. The Supreme Paint Co will order it for us; ArtDiscount stock it; Natural Pigments (Europe) stock their own Flake White, Flemish White, occasionally Stack Lead white, and other interesting whites. And I understand you can import it from the USA - not sure of the law on that. What I don't understand are the companies that'll sell you Michael Harding's Red Lead, Naples Yellow Genuine, and Lead Tin Yellow, all of which, I think, contain PW 1, but not the lead white. Where's the logic? Silver White, from the Shin Han company, got through for a while - until the authorities realized it was actually lead. With all this, and panics over cadmiums and cobalts (with some companies cashing in with ranges of "cadmium-free" colours they falsely claim are as good as cadmium) you'd think the powers that be would be much happier if we all used the powdered poster paint we had to put up with at school.