Ask me about Art

[ascanius]

Thanks that helps me a lot, especially the last part. This is going to add depth to my culture, thanks again. Can olive oil be used to make paints? just curious. what about painting on stone. Are their any special considerations? were their pigments that made from organic sources that did not loose their light fastness. If so was the lake process used? And what about the color white. I can see that as being very difficult to make, is it?

 

[grahamguitarman]

Olive oil can't be used for painting as its a non hardening oil, typical drying oils which can be used in paints are; linseed oil, walnut oil, poppyseed oil, safflower oil, and tung oil (tung oil is mostly used in china).

I forgot to mention lead white in my list of pigments, it is a very old pigment that has been around since ancient times. Lead white is a type of lead carbonate created by corroding lead with vinegar. when you see the white deposits on the lead terminals of car batteries, that is a similar type of lead white! Of course lead white is toxic, and has been banned in most household paints now, though it is still possible to obtain lead white for artistic painting purposes.

I'm not sure about painting on stone, there isn't really much of a tradition of that, though Greek and Roman statues were actually painted in bright colours. My knowledge is mostly based on sculpture, frescoes and canvas paintings.

Incidentally, I found this picture today, which shows the typical range of natural mineral and earth based pigments used in painting:

 

[Ravana]

Can you ID those minerals, graham? I can place a third of them off the top of my head, could make reasonable guesses to another third.… The one I'm most interested in is the blue on the right. Unless someone hit an exceptional deposit both in terms of color and in terms of crystal rather than massy formation, that can't be lapis lazuli (which is what the center specimen appears to be; center could be azurite, I suppose, but if it is it's lousy azurite). Whatever that one on the right is, I want one!

Pretty orpiment/realgar specimen there, too–assuming I have that one right.

One correction: cinnabar was not found exclusively in China. It's been mined in Spain since pre-Roman times. It should show up anywhere that mercury does–should in fact be more common than natural liquid mercury.

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(P.S. Not only is azurite "often" found with malachite, it's close to inevitably found with it–to the point where it's usually responsible for at least some of the banding in the malachite itself. The association is very convenient in telling lapis lazuli and azurite apart: if there's malachite with it, what you have is azurite. Whether or not you have enough to do you any good–i.e. make your blue out of–is another story.… )

 

[grahamguitarman]

Ha ha you probably know more about that than I do, I'm not really a mineralogist, my interest being purely limited to pigment use. Like most artists, if I get natural pigments they are usually ready ground into powder form, so I rarely see the original stones.

I would agree that the centre one would be the lapis lazuli, and the one on the right looks like it could be Azurite (though I'm not 100% sure on that). You are right about the orpiment, this was once a common yellow pigment in old paintings, but was difficult to use because of its tendency to react to other pigments, and its high toxicity.

Not all of these will be minerals by the way, there are red and yellow clays (earth pigments) there too and I think there is a large lump of Sanguine or Haematite as it is also called.

I wasn't aware that cinnabar was mined in Spain too, its usually associated in the art world with china (perhaps the Chinese cinnabar was of a superior quality?)

Oh and I found this picture of a French ochre mine earlier while trying to identify some of the earth pigments above:

Gives you an idea of just how colourful even plain old dirt can be!