Antrese Wood: Hey, it's Antrese, and welcome to the Savvy Painter Podcast. This episode is sponsored by Gamblin Artists Colors and we've teamed up to create a very special episode for you. I collected questions from you and Gamblin is here to answer them.

Robert Gamblin: Hi, I'm Robert Gamblin. I'm the founder of Gamblin Artists Colors. I founded the company in 1980. We now have a wonderful facility that gives excellent work to 25 people and we make only materials based on oil for oil painting and printmaking.

Antrese Wood: Robert answers questions about pigments, how Gamblin developed their line, artists they've worked with to create colors, and he shares the strangest stories for pigment sources.

Also, I'm sure you've seen the new blue pigment discovered up in Oregon. That story has been a hot topic on social media for some time. Well, Robert was able to play with some samples of it and he shared his assessment.

Mary Weisenburger: Well, hello my name is Mary and I'm a product specialist at Gamblin.

Antrese Wood: I also have a quick question with Mary. She answers Edgar Soberón's question about why some paints have more oil separation in the tubes. Next up is Pete Cole.

Pete Cole: Hi, I'm Pete Cole. I'm the president of Gamblin Artists Colors.

Antrese Wood: Pete answers questions about toxicity. He dispels some of the myths around cadmium and oil painting, and he gets into the nitty-gritty details of [Christina Rotelli's] question about cap sizes.

After listening to this episode, you might want some of the resources that Robert, Mary, and Pete mention. About once a month, Gamblin sends out helpful tips for oil painters and printmakers. They've put together a special PDF download for Savvy Painter listeners who sign up for their email list.

Go to gamblincolors.com/savvypainter to get their monthly tips and the free download that shows you step-by-step how to varnish your paintings. The folks over at Gamblin answered questions from 25 different artists. This is an episode jam-packed with information you can use every day in your studio. I'll start by talking with Robert Gamblin, then Mary, and then Pete Cole weighs in with his expertise. This episode has a couple of parts to it. Okay, here we go. Here is Robert Gamblin.

Welcome, Robert. Thank you so much for doing this with me.

Robert Gamblin: It's a pleasure. A pleasure to be here.

Antrese Wood: Can you tell me a little bit about Gamblin and how you started it?

Robert Gamblin: I'd be happy to. I went to art school in the late '60s. When I graduated, there was really no one waiting to hire us with all of our smarts and all of our creativity. So as most artists do, you have to get creative with how you make a living.

For 10 years, I did a variety of jobs. Then the last job that I had was a custom acrylic plastic fabrication, and that was a pivotal point in my life in the sense that when I started that job, I was working for my uncle.

He would bring in a stack of work orders for the day and say, "Okay, here we go. How do you organize your day?" I had no conception of project thought or how to actually organize production. Within a relatively short period of time, I could take a stack of papers and sort them and knew what my cutlist was going to be so I could maximize my table saw time and then maximize my table space, and it really taught me what I always thought of as production thought.

But for doing all of those jobs, none of them were close enough to painting to satisfy me. After having gone through art school, I really had dedicated my life to art, and I wanted a life, I wanted a living as close to oil painting as possible.

Since I was skilled with working with my hands and skilled with formulation through many years in the kitchen, moving into making oil colors, it seemed like a fantastic thing to do. Like, “How could you possibly do this?” In the end, it seemed like, “How come it took you so long to figure this out? It's so obvious that this is perfect for what you should be doing. You understand painting. You understand how materials come together. You understand how and when you apply force to one set of raw materials you end up with something else.”

In the end, it was just like, "Gosh, why did it take me so long?" Then came the educational aspect because I had gone through art school up to the point where I was about to enter into a master's program to become a teacher and at that point, I decided, “I'm really done with school. I'm not going to do this. I'm going to find another way.”

But through the business, I realized that I ended up doing as much teaching as if I had become an art instructor because one of the things that was really missing in the world at that time, and still we do a tremendous amount of our effort in this area is to help educate artists about their materials and processes because to be truthful, there's not a lot of that that comes through most art education.

We really end up doing a lot of teaching about materials. In the early years, it was just me going around the country, visiting every art school I could. Now we've grown to the point where we have a team of people, we have 10 or 12 artists that are living around the country who go into teaching for us.

Antrese Wood: Oh, wow.

Robert Gamblin: That was the beginning. I mean, just personally want to have a life and a livelihood as close to painting as possible. I ended up thinking that I didn't end up close to painting. I actually ended up inside painting.

Antrese Wood: In the paint. How did you decide that you were going to make oil paint? Most companies make a lot of other stuff and you only make oil paint. Why is that? How did you get there?

Robert Gamblin: Well, I was an oil painter and I never wanted more than a small company. We still are a very small company. Oil colors have been central to the history of art over the last 600 years. The most powerful images that we have are done as oil paintings. The most valuable artworks that we have in our culture are oil paintings.

That's no accident. There is no other painting medium that is as powerful and as versatile as oil painting. It was natural to just become a manufacturer of oil colors and printmaking inks based on oil and all of those mediums.

It seems like, “Oh, you really do oil colors?” Well, to us, it really looks like a lot of work and it's very complicated, many, many things that we make. We're very happy to just be experts at oil painting and oil painting-related materials and not have to get into acrylics or watercolors or pastels or things like that.

Antrese Wood: Yeah. So then you can really dig into that particular medium and just be the completely focused experts on that.

Robert Gamblin: Yeah, we're focused, we're dedicated to one thing.

Antrese Wood: I have questions for you from listeners of the podcast and I'd love to start off with, this first one comes from Matthew Lopez. Matthew is asking, “What is the strangest story for a pigment source for your paints? What pigment do you wish you could use but don't because it's too expensive?”

Robert Gamblin: That is an interesting question, I agree. It brings up some very pivotal points in our history. The first thing I think about is that in 1989, we were given a project that we've always called the Smithsonian Project.

The Smithsonian Support Center, which is outside of Washington, wanted a whole set of colors, most of which are obsolete pigments, to use in their testing. If you're going to try to find out what's the best solvent to use to clean lead-tin yellow, you can't just go to a valuable painting on the wall and start doing experiments with it. So they wanted 200 different paint formulations so that they could do destructive testing.

Antrese Wood: Oh, wow.

Robert Gamblin: Find out what the best thing to use was. This was a valuable project for them, but for me as a paint maker, it gave me a reach back into our history 200 or 300 years where I never would have had the time to gather all of these materials together and just spend time making color.

But they needed this and so they paid me to do this work for them. It gave me this look back into our history that was just incredibly valuable. The most important thing I think that came to me is that many of us who are interested in this read back about these stories of lapis blue and antimony red and all of these obsolete things that we no longer have with us and think like, "Oh, wow, I wish I had access to that. That would be really cool."

After having made them, I could see that I got a tremendous appreciation for where we are now in the history of art as artists. We are living at the richest time in history for color. There has never been such a wealth of pigments available to the artists.

Yes, we have lost things, but everything that we have lost, we've lost for a very good reason. We've lost because that material was highly toxic and it was replaced by something that was much more benign, or that material was not particularly lightfast and so it's been replaced by something that is very lightfast or a material that was incredibly difficult to produce in terms of its texture and it was produced now by something that is very easy to work with.

Everything that we've lost, we've lost for good reasons and this is literally the richest time in history to be living as an artist in terms of pigments. But to answer the question more directly, there are very few things from that time that I think would be fun to be able to produce.

One of them was ultramarine blue from lapis. Now, having made ultramarine blue from lapis several times, I personally feel that the synthetic version that we've had available to us since the 1860s, what we think of as ultramarine blue today, or what some companies call French ultramarine, that blue is more beautiful than genuine ultramarine blue is, in my personal opinion, as an oil paint.

But still, I wish I had it just because it has this incredible storied history. As far as new pigments, just a few years ago here in Oregon, at Oregon State University, a scientist developed what has been called YInMn blue.

Antrese Wood: Yes, I read about that.

Robert Gamblin: We were one of the first people to get samples of it and we turned it into paint and we were disappointed for a couple reasons. One is that if we were to produce a 37 ml tube of it, it would have to have a cost of about $200 a tube.

Antrese Wood: Wow, why is that?

Robert Gamblin: Well, because it has three basic components in its makeup and two of them are rare earth minerals. That just really increases the cost of it as raw material. We have a list of artists who still want to use it and still want to buy it, regardless of the cost.

So when it is finally available, we will buy a small amount and we will produce it on a very limited basis. But the price was disappointing. The other thing, to tell you the truth, the color is not so great. It's about somewhere in the middle of ultramarine blue and phthalo blue in terms of its tinting strength and it's a little bit like cobalt blue in terms of its color.

If you take cobalt blue and add maybe 15% phthalo blue to it, then you end up with a dead ringer for this YInMn blue for the cost of series two colors, so it's disappointing on a couple of levels. I think that what I wish is, “Oh, it would have been fabulous and I wish it had been cheap.” But none of those things are actually happening.

Antrese Wood: Oh, that's such a disappointment because I keep seeing that going around on the internet and everybody's like, “Oh, my God, have you seen this blue?”

Robert Gamblin: Yeah, but the craziest thing that I think we have been able to do is our Torrit Grey. We essentially 20 years ago or more found that we had all this pigment accumulating in our dust extractor. Hey, yes, what it does is it accumulates pigment dust.

For the listener to understand what I'm talking about, whenever we have a bag of open pigment, wherever there is a mixer where dry pigment is being put into oil, there is an air collection port right at that location. Any dust that tries to escape is captured into the dust collection system.

Then that accumulates in the bottom of the dust collector. We end up with this pigment that is literally a mix of every single pigment that we use and so we collect that and then for more than 20 years, we have produced what we call Torrit Grey. Torrit Grey is our dust collector and so I'm sure that many of your listeners have had a chance to try Torrit Grey because we have literally produced two or three hundred thousand tubes of Torrit Grey we've produced over the years from our dust collector and we will just continue to do that because the option is we either send this dust to the landfill or we turn it back into paint.

Antrese Wood: That is a great story. I'm curious though, how do you maintain consistency in the color?

Robert Gamblin: We don't. We don't even try. Every single batch of Torrit Grey is different from every single batch of Torrit Grey that has ever existed. It's totally unique every time we make it.

Antrese Wood: Oh, my god, I have to admit I haven't used it yet, but now I'm so curious. It sounds like it would be fun. Somebody was telling me that they do paintings, there's just like a randomizer for when you need to play with your creativity levels and they literally just reach into their bag and pull three random paints out and then make a painting with that. In some ways, it’s nicer though, it reminds me a little bit of that, but that sounds like a lot of fun.

Robert Gamblin: It is. It is.

Antrese Wood: Speaking of colors and the invention of colors, Jenni Stringleman says that she woke up really excited from a dream and that she was painting with a new color called gray gold. It's such a big memory that she went straight online to see if it existed. She's asking, “Is this the kind of thing that you dream about?” I guess, the base question is, where do you get your colors from?

Robert Gamblin: Yes, well, that is really one of the most unusual questions I think I've had. To be honest, it was interesting to think about. I actually don't dream about colors that we don't have but I have dreamt about colors that we do have, especially with color combinations.

The most recent dream that I had about color combination is as I had a dream about this mountain and it was a very sort of columnar-shaped mountain with almost a flat top.

In fact, I'm here in the studio. I'm looking at the painting that I made from it of the dream as I'm talking to you. The dream was about this total rapturous beauty of yellow ochre in the sun and ultramarine blue in the shadow of this hill. At the base of the hill climbing up it was a village.

It's interesting to me that the dream was so beautiful. The yellow ochre was so golden and glowing and the ultramarine blue was so deep and rich. That's my struggle with this painting is to try to work it so that it comes somewhere close to the intensity of my dream. So yeah, I have dreamt about color a little bit.

Antrese Wood: That's fantastic. The next question comes from John Seed. John was actually a guest on the podcast. He writes for The Huffington Post. He was wondering if Gamblin has made custom colors for any well-known artists.

Robert Gamblin: We have. We have made custom colors in the past. We do it very rarely because most artists are of course very happy with being able to choose from 100 colors and then mix the millions of colors that they can make from those. But occasionally, there's an artist who desires and it's mostly for shortcut purposes or sometimes because they want a very specific working property built into that color and we've made it for them. Generally, the minimum has been a gallon.

If they were able to order a gallon, we would be able to do it for them. For many years, we made a custom white for James Rosenquist. He wanted a white that had a very soft feel to it and would take a longer time to dry and he had a specific idea on how that should be and so we made that for him for many years.

One of the champions of our company from almost the beginning was Nathan Oliveira who was a Bay Area artist. He taught at Stanford for many years in their art department.

Antrese Wood: John was actually a student of his.

Robert Gamblin: Oh, you're kidding? Oh, that's great. Nathan was very much involved with earth colors, not only because of how earth colors looked, but because he wanted to bring that earth energy into all of his work, and he especially had a strong relationship with orange and all of the earth-based oranges.

One day he called me up and he said, "Robert, I really need to use Asphaltum." He said, "But I've read about Asphaltum historically and how terrible a color it was that it aged, but can you make a copy of it for me?" It just so happens that the week before I had made Asphaltum in a glass beaker as I was testing printmaking grounds, so there I had it, here's Asphaltum and I could see it's what its masstone was in the thicker areas and I can see what the color of its transparency was through the thinner areas looking through the glass. “No problem, I can do this for you.” I made it for him initially as a custom color, and then that color actually made it into our line as our Asphaltum.

Antrese Wood: Oh, wow. That's a great story. It's the perfect person to ask about it.

Robert Gamblin: Truly. We had one other event with him. He was an early tester of our brown-pink color. There are a few companies that make brown-pink and everyone who does it has their own proprietary mixture for what's going to be their brown-pink.

He was a tester of it and he liked it so much that he asked me to make it as an etching ink for him. I made it about a gallon of etching ink and he went to Crown Point Press and made a couple of bodies of work just with that brown pink and I own one of those beautiful prints.

It is always a wonderful memory of that time. Actually, I did it as a trade. I traded him the ink for the print, which was really quite nice. The ink is long gone and the print is still up on my wall.

Antrese Wood: Yeah, I was going to say, I think you got a good deal.

Robert Gamblin: Yeah. But perhaps the most important custom thing that we ever did was working with Wolf Kahn. Wolf Kahn, who is a second-generation abstract expressionist who essentially took those concerns into landscape painting, he's worked in New York his whole life, and in Southern Vermont, he was a mentor to me.

Through the '90s, I painted with him absolutely as much as I could. He has an interesting painting technique. He has mood oil painting to be as close to his process of making a pastel as possible, which means he wants as many tints and grays as possible.

Then he only does his color mixing on the surface. He doesn't do any color mixing on his palette. Through his advice and support, that's where our whole line of radiance and our Portland Greys came from.

Antrese Wood: Oh, wow. That's really cool.

Robert Gamblin: Thank you. For the listeners who have not had any contact with radiants, they're merely a small color wheel of high-intensity tints. In order to find out which one was going to be radiant yellow or radiant red, I made a value seven tint out of every pigment in the factory.

The ones that were the highest intensity became that radiant. You might think, "Oh, cadmium red is a really strong color. So maybe radiant red is cadmium red.” But I found that the tint of Perylene Red was the strongest red we had in the factory. The radiant red is a tint of Perylene Red, just as an example.

Antrese Wood: That's an excellent lead-in to my next question, which comes from Christina Rotelli. Christina wants to know what is the difference between radiant white and titanium white. Is it better to use to make tints? If so, why?

It's a three-part question, so we can break this up if we need to, but the last one, I think you just answered it, which is how and why you developed the range of radiant colors.

Robert Gamblin: Well, she has a three-part question and I consider this probably the most important thing we're going to be talking about today, and I'm going to add another couple of parts to it. Essentially what she's done is she's opened up the door to talking about the value of white in the painting process.

Antrese Wood: Yes.

Robert Gamblin: It's not for me. It's not just a question between radiant and titanium. It is a question about which white is going to support my work the best. When you look at our color chart, you'll see that we make nine different whites. We only make a hundred colors and nine of them are whites.

You can clearly see that we feel that the question of white is absolutely the most important thing in terms of the whole painting process, purely because probably the central value of the color chart, if you were to look at it that way, is maybe the value five at the highest and maybe down to a value four.

Then you look at the world around us and the world exists at a value of seven or eight. In order to pull the whole palette of colors up, white becomes our tool to do that.

It ends up with most oil paintings as being at least 50% white paint and for many paintings, that could be 75% or more of the paint that actually makes it onto the surface is white. Therefore, white is very much in the driver's seat of what the whole experience of painting is all about.

Antrese Wood: I have so many questions about this because I typically just pick one white and I use that and I don't really understand the difference between all the whites. I think there's probably a lot of people that are like that. This is a great topic.

Robert Gamblin: I want to refer all your listeners to our white chart. It exists right in the middle of our color chart. All of these whites are listed with all of the characteristics. It's available on our website where our whites are discussed, you'll find this chart also.

The chart lists all of the colors, it talks a little bit about their characteristics, but it rates them all in terms of their drying rate, what oil they're based on, what their tinting strength and their opacity are, what their color temperature is, and just exactly what their texture is, whether they're really, really stiff or they're really buttery or whether they're soft.

I feel that artists could use that as a beginning point because so many of us, our teacher used this white and we introduced this to it and so we've sort of stuck with that, whether it's the best for us or not. Just to give you an example to answer your listener's question, the difference between titanium white and radiant white is generally what drives most of the differences, is titanium white is based on linseed oil and radiant white is based on safflower oil.

That leads to the titanium white being a little warmer in color because linseed oil is slightly yellow and safflower oil is not, therefore the radiant white is going to be more neutral in color. The titanium white is naturally faster in drying. It has more linoleic acid in it, so it combines with oxygen in the air much more readily, and so it dries naturally faster, which means radiant white is going to be slower in drying.

They both have this similar tinting strength, so they're both the strongest tinting strength, have the most titanium in any of the other whites so they're going to be definitely the strongest whites.

But the difference that we have built into it is that the titanium white has a more buttery texture, and the radiant white has a softer feel to it. We can't tell you which of these characters is going to be more important to you so we have tried to build a huge variety of characteristics into these whites so that the artist can find one that most perfectly meets their needs.

Antrese Wood: So then the difference is radiant dries slower because it's safflower oil, you said?

Robert Gamblin: Yes.

Antrese Wood: But the tinting strength between radiant white and titanium white is equal.

Robert Gamblin: It's the same.

Antrese Wood: It’s the same.

Robert Gamblin: The same tinting strength. The differences are going to be dry time and color temperature.

Antrese Wood: And the texture.

Robert Gamblin: And texture. Yes.

Antrese Wood: What did you do and how? Did you change the texture? Did you just do that so that you would have some variability for the artist experience?

Robert Gamblin: Yes, just purely for variability. There are some artists who really want to paint to be absolutely as workable as possible out of the tube and we can't do that with every color. We can really only do that with white and so we can give you a white that is softer that when you put it in with every color, it's going to make them really very brushable and so that's a quality we built into that.

With most of the whites, they're going to be stiffer than that because you may want to use them with a painting knife and so the soft texture is not going to be appropriate for a painting knife. We've only made a couple of colors that are soft so that they are really brushable easily out of the tube.

Antrese Wood: As a follow-up question to that one about the white, [inaudible] King wanted to know what gave flake white replacement its consistency. What additive process do you use? He's comparing it to titanium.

Robert Gamblin: Well, I'd like to tell the story a bit about flake white replacement. The reason it exists is because we as a company have done all that we can to make oil painting absolutely as benign and as safe as possible.

The beginning part of that is to get all of the toxic pigments out of the palette. We do nothing in lead, mercury, or arsenic. We do nothing in really strong solvents. That means we've never had a lead white, we've never had a flake white. But as an artist and as a paint maker, I tremendously value the contribution that lead white has made to the history of oil painting.

I felt that even though we weren't going to come out with a lead white through my considerable skills as a formulator, I felt that I could give artists a paint that worked absolutely like lead without having any lead in it.

In order to open up the process, there's a painter, Robert Barnes is his name and he taught for many years at Indiana University. I used to run into him at least once a year at the College Art Association meeting and every single year, he would needle me.

He said, "Robert, when are you going to start making lead white? I love your colors, but I'm never going to use your whites because I only use lead white." It was just this running joke between us.

I'd gone to the point where I was ready to do this lead white thing. I've got time for it. So I called Robert Barnes up and I said, "Robert, I want to formulate a lead white, and I think I can do it, but I need your help. I'm going to make these whites as close as I can to the working properties of lead.”

That's an interesting thing, because to start this, I bought every single lead white on the market, and I looked at them in detail, and there was not one that was alike another. They were all very, very different from each other in terms of their textural properties.

But I think there's one thing that we can agree on: that lead white is heavy and dense in its texture and it is relatively opalescent in terms of its tinting strength and its opacity. That is one of the reasons why so many portraits from the past look so absolutely lifelike is because of the opalescent quality of the lead white that relates to the semi-transparency of the skin.

I said, “We can agree on what these characteristics are, and I'm going to work with my materials. I'm going to make a white that matches these.” We started with letters of the alphabet, batch A, batch B, batch C, and I would send them to Robert and he would call me back and say, “Oh, and it needs a little bit more this, a little bit more that.”

Finally, one day, we were at batch N in the alphabet. The phone rings and Robert's on the phone and he says, "Robert, I can't believe what's happening." I said, "What is it? What's happening on your palette?" He said, "I've got your latest copy here and I keep reaching for my lead white and I can't tell the difference between them.” I said, “Robert, that's not a problem. It's time for us to go to press.” That's when we released our flake white replacement. That's the story of it.

Antrese Wood: Wow, that's a great story. I love it. It's great that you took the person who was most critical of it, but he was very invested in it.

Robert Gamblin: I needed a tough audience because that's the only way I was going to have confidence in what we had achieved.

Antrese Wood: I love it. I have a couple of questions about the technique. Alice Riley wants to know what advice you would give an artist who's never used oils before and where would you begin.

Robert Gamblin: I think that is a great question because there are many painters who get involved with painting through acrylics and then they get ready to move up into oil paints and they're not quite sure how to do it or they've been watercolorists for many years and get tired of trying to try to protect the painting so much as you have to do with watercolor and they want to try the oil.

Here are a few recommendations on how to get going. If they're already a painter, whether it be a watercolorist or acrylic painter, then they've got a familiarity with a certain palette of colors that they like. I think they should start there.

Go out, accumulate a few colors that you're already familiar with, and start there because you know how they mix, they know their value to you. Then as time goes by, if you find that you need more colors, then you can add to it at that time.

But I think starting with what you already know, because there are so many other things that are going to be new, let's not throw in color mixing as something that has to be learned also.

Antrese Wood: Good advice.

Robert Gamblin: But going back to one of the first things we talked about is to get into our color chart or our website and try to carefully choose which white. I could say, go get some titanium white like the rest of the world does and start there, but I would really think if you got a little time for research, look at the color chart and try to choose one that matches at least with your dry time.

You may know I want my paintings to dry really fast or you're going to want to paint for days on end so try to find a white that supports that. If you want me to tell you which white to just start with and you don't want to deal with that, then I would recommend picking up the Titanium Zinc White. I think that would be a good place to begin.

Then in terms of the painting medium, this can get very complicated for an artist. So as to really simplify it, I think they should begin with what we describe as a low viscosity medium. These are the mediums that have been with us from the very, very beginning of oil painting.

We make two of them that are really quite nice, one of them is Galkyd Lite, if you want something that dries a little faster, or Galkyd Slow Dry, if you want something to dry a little slower. But it's not going to be complicated, it's just going to take paint and it's going to thin it and not really try to do anything fancy with the paint in terms of making an enamel like surface or to making an impasto, it's going to be just really straight ahead.

Now concerning surfaces, I would recommend right from the beginning that they buy one or two stretch canvases and one or two panels because they work so differently and they experience a painting, it's going to be so different that they should experience it right from the beginning what it's like to work on a stretch canvas versus working on a harder surface, working on a panel.

Both of those are available now for very inexpensive prices through our supply stores. Then with brushes, I just would like to recommend that there are so many brushes available that they at least buy a couple stiff brushes, hogs, hair, bristles, and also a couple softer bristles because just like working on a different surface is going to be different, working with these stiffer or softer brushes is going to be very different. If you want to work with stiff paint, the stiff brushes are going to be very good. If you want to work with thin paint, the thinner brushes are going to be really very viable.

Antrese Wood: Nice.

Robert Gamblin: Then the last thing I want to mention about starting is there are many painters who begin by painting using paper pallets, those disposable pads of paper pallets. I think that's totally okay, but I think that the experience of painting is greatly enhanced by having something that is more permanent.

I could recommend something as simple as buying some painters like to work on a sheet of glass. I personally don't like that because the glass is so hard, but a piece of very smooth plywood is absolutely a wonderful surface for paint mixing. Mine, which I'm looking at right now, has been worked on hundreds and hundreds of times, and it just glows with this beautiful deep luster that it has.

Antrese Wood: Yeah, because it absorbs all the oil, and eventually you get a glass-like surface.

Robert Gamblin: Exactly. Just one tip about taking care of a palette is to clean up every day, and then that palette will be perfect for you when you come there. You see many painters and they never clean up their palettes. It becomes a real difficult time in order to work for color mixing.

Antrese Wood: Do you clean it entirely off? I know a lot of people keep the colors on the side.

Robert Gamblin: Yeah, the reservoir where every color is, is not changed, but the mixing area is cleaned every day. I want to mention one thing for the beginning painter that I think is very valuable. Painters sometimes will not discover this for many years down their career, and that is to lay out your colors in a perfect chromatic arrangement, especially starting with yellow over to one side. What this does is it keeps yellows away from all of the things on your palette that are going to make it want to turn green.

If you want a nice pure clean yellow, you will have an area of your palette that has not been mixed with because so many things on the palette want to make yellow turn green. We even have this technique in one of our videos. On our website, they can search for “navigating color space” and there's this little discussion of setting up the palette this way.

Antrese Wood: That is fantastic. Another question related to technique comes from Jeanie, and Jeanie has a color theory conundrum. She says, "Why do cool objects cast warm shadows and warm objects cast cool shadows?"

Robert Gamblin: Well, I'm not sure I totally agree with all of that assumption, but the color of objects is a function of the color of that object on its surface and the color of light that's falling on that surface.

For example, if you have a warm-colored object and its shadow looks cooler, then the color of the light must also be cooler. Let's say you have a red vase that's lit with a yellow light and that red vase is also sitting on a red tablecloth. The shadow would also be warm in color, but it would be cooler than the base because there's less yellow light falling on it.

From my perspective, it's an additive thing. You have the color of the object and you have the color of the light, and if you take one of those away, then you have, let's slightly change this around, because in landscape painting, we frequently find that objects, say a tree looks very warm because it's lit with warm light and its shadow is going to look very cool, well, generally that shadow is being lit with the color of the sky which is blue and the tree is being lit by the color of the sun which is yellow and so you get regardless of what the color of the objects is, the color of the light is different.

I'm suspecting that this artist is really reacting primarily to a difference in the quantity of, and the color of the light that's falling on the object and also falling on the shadow. Because there is light falling on the shadow, it's just not as much, usually.

Antrese Wood: Yeah, and then you also have reflected light coming up from a surface that will affect it too.

Robert Gamblin: Yeah, it gets very complicated.

Antrese Wood: Yeah. One of the last questions I have for you, Robert, comes from Sean Sullivan. He's saying that he prefers the old Gamvar that you had to mix yourself because he feels like the consistency was better. It's less likely to bead up and you could brush it on as thickly as you want. Is there any chance of bringing back the old formula for those who prefer it? It’s his question although he understands why you have the premix.

Robert Gamblin: Yes. I personally find this question a little bit confusing because I have heard it just once or twice before that artists think that the premix Gamvar is different from the ready-made Gamvar. Actually, the kit form and then the ready-made, that there's a difference between them.

But they have absolutely the same formula. Gamvar was developed at the National Gallery around 1990 by the work of René de la Rie. I used to go to the National Gallery every year and I met with René and I discovered his work and I asked him if he would work with me, if the National Gallery would work with me to bring his formula, his work to the studio artist because it was such an amazingly stable varnish that required such mild solvent.

It's an amazing material to have access to. So the National Gallery worked with us and we adapted this formula very slightly. Essentially what we did is we added more resin to it because the conservator generally is accustomed to varnishing a painting very, very, very lightly.

Then the next day looking, “Okay, it needs a little bit more over here and just varnishing that spot. It needs a little bit over here and varnishing that spot.” Then the day later coming back and looking at it again and varnishing a little bit. These very, very mild varnishes. For the studio artist, we needed a resin concentration that was going to allow virtually all artists to varnish once and not have to go back and do it again.

That's the work that he did with us to adjust his formula. That's the formula that was in the kit version. That's the formula that is in the premade version that we have now, but I can understand where people think, “Oh, they changed the packaging, so they must have changed the formula,” where in essence, we haven't.

In our own work, we've been using it since we developed it in the early '90s, and I don't see any difference. There may be some change to that artist's technique in terms of the paint layers. Maybe they have a slightly different medium-to-paint ratio that is changing how Gamvar lays down for them.

Now this issue of beating up, I don't necessarily want to take a long time with it now, but if artists have that issue, they can contact us through our website and we have a series of techniques to help with that.

Essentially, what's going on is that Gamvar is a very low-viscosity fluid, and just like when you spray water onto a freshly waxed car, that water beads up because of the difference in surface tension between the surface of the car and the surface of the water.

That can happen in a painting. If a painting is very, very glassy because it has a lot of medium in the surface of it or even in a spot, then Gamvar is going to beat up because it is low viscosity and we have techniques for helping artists to deal with that.

Antrese Wood: Thanks so much Robert and now I'm going to switch it over to Mary. Mary, my question for you is from Edgar Soberon. Edgar says that he's used Gamblin colors for many years and he also enjoys using many of your waxes and mediums.

He also likes your informative website. His question is the following. He's found that the oil and the pigment are separating inside the tube with much more frequency in many colors. Can you talk about that a little bit? Tell us what's going on.

Mary Weisenburger: Yeah, and that's a great question from Edgar. Essentially, oil throw is what we call this when you have the separation of pigment and oil. The oil is being thrown from the pigment. This is a completely normal thing.

In fact, some separation of oil can and is very possible to happen in all oil colors over time. Essentially, what you should keep in mind is that the larger the tube, the larger the container, the more oil is in the tube, and the more likely this is bound to happen over time.

From our studies, because we've done a lot of work into this, finding out what causes it, we found that the major contributions are age, the age of the tube, and heat, heat and temperature plays a major role in oil throwing inside the tube.

Antrese Wood: Mm-hmm, I've noticed that.

Mary Weisenburger: Yeah, and I know it can be a real messy situation for some painters, but they should be assured that it's completely normal to happen, like how peanut butter separates in the jar, you can expect oil paint to sometimes throw its oil.

We could load up all of our colors with stabilizers to prevent this, but we've chosen not to, mostly because we want to keep our formulas as simple as we can and not load them up with stabilizers to prevent that.

Antrese Wood: Gotcha. What's the best practice for people who experience that you recommend? Because I know a lot of people take it, they may squeeze it out on a piece of cardboard or something like that to absorb the oils.

Mary Weisenburger: Well, it's really a matter of preference. If the paint is still workable with a brush or a knife, it should be usable regardless of oil throw, but if the artist really wants to get the viscosity of the paint more oily, then just simply adding a couple drops of either fine linseed oil or safflower, for example, and working it with a palette knife should get the color back to its original consistency.

Antrese Wood: Gotcha. That was a great explanation of what happens with an oil paint. Thank you so much, Mary. I'm going to switch it over to Pete Cole now. Pete is the president of Gamblin Artists Colors. Next up, I have Pete Cole, who's the president of Gamblin here to answer your questions.

Pete, my first question comes from Ryan Reynolds. Ryan asks, "What do the folks at Gamblin think about water mixable oil paint? Does Gamblin have any plans to produce their own line?

Pete Cole: We don't have any plans to introduce a water-soluble oil. I'll tell you why, and I may go on a bit, but it's important to us. Our mission as a color house is to lead oil painting into the future. We were very happy to leave things in the past of oil painting. We're unafraid to do that. If we thought water-soluble oils were the future of oil painting, we would absolutely make them and we would try our hardest to make the best water-soluble oils, but we don't feel that way.

Fundamentally, they are just a terrible compromise for the artist. As a painter, when you switch to a water soluble oil from traditional oils, you give up a tremendous amount of pigmentation. Your colors are just less intense across your entire palette.

The working properties of water-soluble oils are also quite different. You don't just lose some of the opacity in colors, you also lose texture and a lot of mark-making possibilities when you go from traditional oil color to water soluble. The promise of water soluble oils is that you're somehow safer.

That's just not the case. The way that they're made is essentially taking what would be a traditional oil color. There's less pigment. There's soap and other chemicals added to make them easier to clean up. There's a bit less linseed oil perhaps.

Essentially, you're no safer. You've taken out a bit of pigment, you've added soap, and the material itself is no safer. What you have is a slightly easier cleanup and a cleanup you can do without solvents, but you can accomplish the same thing with traditional oils by working a bit more simply, removing solvent from your process and using our safflower oil, soap and water, or even dish soap to clean your brushes.

In our view, water soluble, the artist just gives up far too much in terms of possibilities for their work and gets very little back. You get a slightly easier cleanup process, if that.

Antrese Wood: What exactly is it that is toxic in the paints? I know the solvents are and I know there's concern about particular colors, cadmium, lead being like the obvious ones or the ones that we hear about the most. But it sounds like from what you're saying is that there are additional additives that go into the water mixable oil paint, but you still have the issue of the pigments and then they're just reduced.

Pete Cole: Correct. Nothing has changed on the pigments. The pigments that we're using in an oil paint are generally the same pigments that are in a watercolor or an acrylic. We're all working from the same universe of pigments. To your point, you're not really changing anything on the pigment front when you go from a traditional oil to a water-soluble, you're really just giving up a lot of color and mark-making possibility and getting back a slightly easier cleaning process.

To us, that's a really bad compromise and a bad deal for the artist. You touched on one of the great myths of oil painting or misperceptions and that it's that somehow there's something just inherently unhealthy or bad about oil paints and that somehow acrylics are a more responsible material to work with.

That's just not the case. If you look at what they're made of, fundamentally, oil paints come from a field and your acrylic paints come from a refinery. Oil paints are made with linseed oil, which to most of us is known as flaxseed oil, same thing, and it's essentially food.

Flax is in muffins, it's in your oatmeal, it's in cosmetics, moisturizers, it's a vegetable oil from a plant. That same plant, the flax plant also gives us the linen that we paint on, the seeds of it are pressed to give us linseed oil that we make our paint with, and the stock of the plant is stripped and woven into the linen that we paint on.

So there really couldn't be anything simpler about it and more natural about it. By contrast, when you work with acrylics, that is a plastic, and plastic is derived from a drum of crude oil. To me, if a painter is looking for natural materials to work with and to be around, oil paints are absolutely the answer. I can talk a bit about pigment if you'd like.

Antrese Wood: Yes, I would love to hear about that. Can you give me a rundown of which pigments have a reputation for being very toxic and what alternatives are there or how can artists best work with them? Then like what are the ones from your point of view, from your knowledge that really are toxic and what are the ones that are just getting a bad rap?

Pete Cole: Sure. I'll start by just talking a bit about the three eras of pigment history and these are things we explain really fully on our website and in our color chart in particular. The history part of it is interesting but what really matters is how this information helps artists build the right palette for their painting.

I'm happy to have folks listen to me but our site is great resource and in particular, our color chart. You've basically got three eras of pigment history. The first era of pigment history begins with the colors of classical oil painting.

Those are your siennas, your umber, basically your earth colors. These colors are mined rocks. Your umber, for example, is a mined rock. Your burnt umber is umber literally burned in an oven to shift the color of the pigment.

When you're painting with an earth color, you're painting with the linseed oil we talked about a few moments ago, which is essentially food, it's a vegetable oil. You're painting with rock. As an artist, you could consider that inert. It is as dangerous as a rock on the beach to you.

The next era of pigment history is the colors of impressionist painting, and this is your cobalt and cadmium colors, for example. Basically, what happened, the blast furnace was invented in mankind through all manner of things into the blast furnace to see what would happen.

One of the things that we discovered was that burning different metals at different temperatures produced a whole new range of colors. So over a relatively short period of time after a few hundred years of just having different colors of earth pigments to work with, artists got cadmium red, cadmium orange, all these incredible new colors based on metals.

The third era of pigment history is all the colors that are hard to pronounce your phthalos, your quinacridones, dioxazine and these are colors that are essentially pigments created to serve modern industry.

They are relatively less expensive than a cadmium color. They're more intense in their tints. They're consistent and they are essentially lab-made pigments based on carbon that are made in a lab environment.

In terms of safety, people talk a lot about cadmium colors and they have concerns about them and I think in general, they're vastly overblown. First of all, if you look at the health choices we all make in our own personal lives, whether that's eating red meat occasionally or worse, God forbid, painting with cadmium is one of the last things to possibly worry about if you're concerned about your overall well-being.

They are not kryptonite. Cadmium doesn't sort of emanate badness. It's a metal that you want to avoid eating and you want to avoid inhaling. As far as avoiding eating, I hope that's self-explanatory. As far as avoiding inhaling, the thing to do is not to sand, if you were to paint a painting with a bunch of cadmium colors and then you were to sand it down with a power sander, let's say, and inhale that dust, that could cause problems for you over a long period of time if you were doing that a lot.

If you were working with cadmium pigment loose and you are messy and you are inhaling it and not wearing any sort of protection, that could cause a problem for you over the long term. But if you're a painter working in your studio, you really are completely safe.

There are artists who wear rubber gloves because they feel they need to. That's not the case with our cadmium. You can't absorb them through your skin. There is nothing coming off of them. People worry about off-gassing. There is nothing coming off of them.

Really the trouble is there's as much misinformation out there in the world as there is information. We've always worked hard to clarify that but these things take time and I'm glad people are asking questions about it and being concerned about it.

Antrese Wood: But then why does everybody think that? Where did all this start? Why are there so many misperceptions about the materials?

Pete Cole: I have a two-part answer for that. The first part really relates to the use of turpentine in the oil painting studio. In large part, this has basically been entirely eliminated. Turpentine is really hard to find in oil painting studios.

But if you went to art school in the '50s, '60s, '70s, even into the '80s, you were exposed to turpentine and you were exposed to a lot of it. It was not fun. It was not good for you. It's very memorable.

In addition, during that era of painting, most mediums were damar-based mediums. Damar is a resin that in order to make it fluid, you need a really strong solvent. You need to use turpentine to create a medium with damar. Not only did you have a whole bunch of turpentine around for cleaning brushes, but you also had turpentine in almost all mediums that oil painters would be working with.

That's all in the past now, but I've been around turpentine a lot in my youth and it doesn't feel good. You remember it and you stay away. I think it's a shame for oil painting, but it's a vestige of the past that we're still dealing with and unwinding today.

Robert has really moved oil painting forward by bringing artists, Gamsol, and bringing artists a range of mediums that don't contain any turpentine at all. I think that's one thing that drives it. I think the other one is for me and perhaps for you, I remember working with old oil-based house paints, which are now pretty much banned in most states, but if you were painting kitchen cabinets or doors or trim, you used oil paint and that was, of course, an oil paint derived from petroleum distillates and other chemicals, not linseed oil based like our paints.

Folks that remember working with those paints, as I say, painting large monochromatic works, i.e. walls, they're not fun to be around. I think for some people that's another source of the misperception is that oil means chemicals or crude oil. When in fact, it's flaxseed oil, it's linseed oil, it's safflower oil. I think for me, those are the two big drivers of that misperception, and turpentine is certainly the biggest part of it.

Antrese Wood: Yeah. I remember painting with turpentine and it was awful. I want to go into the next question. Mark Bushnell wants to know if there's a safe way to use water-soluble paints in a small studio with no ventilation to speak of.

He's asking because he lives and works in Northern New England and he doesn't particularly want to open a window for some fresh air in the wintertime. Kumar also has a very similar question. He's working out of basements. What advice do you have for artists who are working in small enclosed places?

Pete Cole: Yes, yes. I grew up in Maine and he has a point for sure. I think that this is easily solved, and I'll give you a couple of options. The first option is just to work without any solvent at all. If you want to, and for people who are super concerned about these things and want to keep it simple, that's great.

Work with traditional oil colors, whether they're ours or anyone else's, and work with our solvent-free mediums as your medium. We offer a fluid version rather and also a gel version.

For cleaning your brushes during your painting session, we offer safflower oil. You could use linseed oil if you wished, that would be fine. We like safflower better. We like safflower because of the clarity of color that it has. It's a little bit paler than linseed.

We found in our own testing that during your painting session, it cleans actually quite well and is certainly better than linseed oil. Then for cleanup at the end of your painting session, you have a range of options. My favorite is not cleaning my brushes at all. I'm sure there are a number of listeners out there that that's also their default technique.

You can certainly do that. You can leave your brushes to soak in safflower oil or linseed, which doesn't eat at them the way that a harsh solvent could or you can use a Masters Brush cleaner or ivory soap to give your brushes a final cleaning.

In short, with this process, it's the same as cooking basically. You don't have anything more dangerous than what you might cook with. You don't need any special ventilation. You don't need to open a window. You don't need to have a fan. You don't need to do anything. Just paint and don't worry about a thing.

If you want to use traditional mediums like our Galkyds that contain some amount of Gamsol solvent or you want to work with a solvent like our Gamsol for brush clean up, that's fine indoors as well, especially for one person painting in their own home.

Normal airflow in a house, if you have any kind, first of all, if you live in New England, you have a drafty house because we all did, and we all still do for the most part. Like it or not, you've got some airflow. Then you've got just natural air flow from opening and closing doors, coming and going from the house.

As long as you're using Gamsol solvent in any sort of responsible way, just reasonable amounts for brush cleaning or thinning your color, you don't need to have an open window. You're not going to have a problem. This is something we've tested fairly extensively in our own lab and I do this, I don't worry about it at all.

Some people do though, and I would rather have someone comfortable and confident with their materials than sort of always a little bit uncomfortable. For that person, the solvent-free approach, I think is best, but otherwise, consider Gamsol for thinning and for brush cleanup, even in Vermont and even in the winter.

Antrese Wood: Nice. Okay. The next question comes from Larry Madrigal. Larry writes, "Since I'm days away from becoming a dad, I'm trying out the Gamblin Solvent-Free medium and Gel to paint in the studio with my newborn. Can you mix anything with this particular medium like wax to reduce the shine? I don't usually prefer glass.” Also, he's wondering if you have any other solvent or toxic-free tips for painting with a baby in the studio.

Pete Cole: Sure. First of all congratulations, Larry. My first recommendation to Larry would be to consider using our Gamvar Matte varnish or our Gamvar Satin varnish. What that's going to do for you, Larry, is to saturate your colors, unify the surface of your painting, and get you a uniform matte look to your work.

The matte is obviously pretty much a dead matte finish. The satin has a bit of gloss to it, but less than what you're seeing by mixing your oil colors with our solvent-free mediums. That would be my first recommendation for you to consider.

The other thing you might consider is using our cold wax medium mixed into the solvent-free mediums. This is really only going to work for you if you like the texture that cold wax gives colors, and if you like the feel of it in your painting process, and you may not, but that's another possibility.

Cold wax does contain a small amount of Gamsol, so it is not a solvent-free medium, but it's minimal. If that bothers you, don't use it. But that's another option for you. I think really, by far, working with the Gamvar Satin or the Gamvar Matte is going to be the best thing for you.

In terms of studio safety considerations with kids, with a newborn, you're certainly a ways away from having someone in the studio going through things but I think that's an important one of not having young kids have access to a studio and everything in it without any adult supervision.

I think that's the one thing to consider for you. If you're working with oils, you're working with solvent-free mediums, there is no other concern or consideration that I can think of. There are many more hazardous things in your kitchen, in your bathroom, and in your garage than in your painting studio when you're working with our colors and our solvent-free mediums.

Antrese Wood: The next question comes from Jane Maclean and she's wondering if you can use Gamvar as a retouch varnish.

Pete Cole: I would not recommend using Gamvar as a retouch varnish, and rather than use a retouch varnish, we would recommend a technique called oiling out. If you have a painting you've been working on for a while, oiling out accomplishes the same thing as a retouch varnish, but without the damar, without the turpentine.

We think it's an easy process and what you're basically doing is applying a mixture of 50% Gamsol and 50% Galkyd or Galkyd Lite if that's what you have around to your painting. You just apply a thin glaze layer and allow it to soak in for a couple of minutes and then just wipe or brush away any excess.

What you get from that is you're essentially feeding the surface of that painting with oil, with fat, and that helps to bring up the colors that have sunken in a bit as they've dried your earth colors, for example. You get that same effect as you get when you work with a retouch where you get a good look at, "Okay, am I done, am I ready to varnish, or do I want to keep painting?”

We feel like that's a better approach and an easier one. There's more information on that on our website, but that would be our recommendation. I would say do not use Gamvar as a retouch. Gamvar is designed to be removable and easily removable with Gamsol at any time. It is not well suited to do the job of a retouch. Oiling out is a much better approach.

Antrese Wood: You guys also have a video about that on your website. It shows them exactly how to do that.

Pete Cole: We do.

Antrese Wood: Going back to the 101 of painting, why varnish in the first place? What does that do for your painting?

Pete Cole: It's a great question and we've seen broadly a resurgence and interest in varnishing. I'll talk a little bit about that. Traditionally, varnishes were made with damar and again that means you're working with turpentine and it's not fun to be around.

Damar varnishes are also incredibly difficult to remove. You really need a conservator to do it and they tend to darken with time. There's just a lot of artists that just gave up varnishing or were never taught it.

If you fast forward to today, our Gamvar is no damar, no turpentine, virtually no odor, dries quickly and it's essentially the easiest way to make your painting look better. That's why if an artist asks me, “Why should I varnish my painting?” I wouldn't give them a lecture about permanence. I'd say it's the easiest way to make your painting look better.

Why is that? As we all know, different oil colors dry to different surface qualities. Some colors become a bit more matte and muted as they dry. Other colors remain more glossy and a bit more intense as they dry.

When you varnish, you essentially saturate color, so you gain saturation. You gain that depth of color back you had when you looked at the painting and it was wet. Then you get a uniform surface quality throughout your painting.

For me, the aesthetic reasons alone are reason enough to varnish. The other nice thing you get is you have a protective layer on your painting that you can easily remove with Gamsol. For a lot of painters out there, I'm sure you're thinking, “I'm not going to do that. The odds of me going back into an old painting are pretty slim.”

I get that, but if you have a painting hanging in your house for 20 years or so and you have some texture to it, you're going to have this accumulation and dust and dirt on it. If you really like that painting, you might want to consider cleaning it and you can do it yourself. Just by using Gamsol, you're able to remove that varnish layer along with all the dirt or dust that's accumulated on it.

Then you can easily re-varnish and put the painting back up on the wall. I'm not going to go around lecturing painters about that, but it's a really nice possibility. But, really varnishing is just the easiest thing you can do to make your painting look better.

Antrese Wood: Then regardless of the type that you use, whether it's gloss or satin or a matte finish, do they still give you that same deep saturation, that same richness of color?

Pete Cole: They do. They absolutely do, but you're going to see more of that with a gloss varnish. You're going to see that deepening and saturation of color with the matte as well, but just not to the same extent because by definition, what a matte varnish is doing is diffusing the light, bouncing off that painting, and coming back to your eye and making it look more matte.

You're not going to get the same color saturation you see with a gloss, but you're going to get more than you had before you varnished for sure. The other thing I mentioned as well is that Gamvar works great on both oil paintings and acrylic paintings, so for folks out there who work in both mediums, that's something to consider.

Antrese Wood: Okay, got it. We talked about these next two a little bit, but I just want to make sure that we specifically talk about this. Jeremiah Palecek is asking if there a good alternatives to cadmiums that are opaque and aren't as toxic. We covered a little bit about that, but are there alternatives to cadmium?

Pete Cole: Yes and no. You can match the mass tone of a cadmium color with its counterpart in the range of modern colors. What's he saying? What I'm saying is, if you're working with cad red medium and you look at Naphthol Red, you're going to find that Naphthol is a pretty close match to cadmium red, cadmium red medium in mass tone.

The trouble as the question points out is that not only the opacity is not there, but you've actually got some transparency and you have a color that makes it intense very differently than that cad red medium.

This is what makes cadmium so special. This is why I paint with a palette weighted towards cadmium colors, they really are very special colors. As of now, there are things that are similar and you know what they are and you can try them, but they're just not the same. That just is what it is.

Antrese Wood: Okay. But as we talked about before, this is presupposing that cadmiums are highly toxic. Maybe with that new information, that's not as much of a concern. Jeremiah actually was a guest on the show so I would be able to follow up with him.

Pete Cole: Oh, wonderful. Yeah, it's one of those things like you could find a lead pencil around and if you write with it or draw with it, you're really not going to have problems. If you eat it or poke yourself with it, well, that's different. With cadmium, it's the same thing. Paint with it. Don't eat it. Don't sand and inhale it and you're fine.

Antrese Wood: This question comes from Fiona Maclean. Fiona is asking what Gamblin's opinion of retouch varnish is. She is worried about using it because she's heard that it might crack.

Pete Cole: Yeah, the recommendation is basically don't do it. We have the same concerns about permanence as other people do about retouching. We don't make one. They generally use a harsh solvent that we wouldn't want our people to be around or that we wouldn't want to be around. Oiling out is just a better, easier approach to get you to the same place.

Antrese Wood: Gotcha. Beautiful. Okay, next we have a question from Claire Remsberg. Claire wants to know how to get started using cold wax mediums with oil paints. Can you give me a cold wax 101?

Pete Cole: Great question, we get lots of questions about cold wax and it is a very versatile and fabulous material. For those of you who are listening and maybe haven't heard of cold wax or are interested in it, there's great information on our website that will go through in more detail how to work with cold wax and some of the things that are possible with it.

A few things to highlight, basically, cold wax medium blurs the line between oil painting and encaustic. The cold wax medium makes colors thicker and more matte and because of the stiffness of the cold wax medium, it holds the sharpest and thickest of marks.

You can really build up texture in your painting. You can carve back into your paint layers using a palette knife. You can also work with it in thinner layers with a significant amount of mediums, say greater than 50%, 60% of the mixture, and a little bit of color and create translucent glazes, translucent layers of paint, much like what you can create using encaustic techniques.

Unlike encaustic techniques, you don't need heat, there's no melting of the wax. None of that is part of the process. You can work with the medium straight out of the container, and mix it into your colors, and it's completely compatible with all of our other oil painting mediums.

Antrese Wood: Then what would be some do's and don'ts for a cold wax? What should people look out for?

Pete Cole: I think the first thing is dry time. Cold wax has a dry time that's a good deal slower than oil colors themselves. The more you use it, the more that you're going to extend your dry times. A thick layer could take 10 days and maybe even more in some environments to dry.

You're going to have a slow dry time. The other thing to bear in mind is that you're working with a wax and it dries to essentially the consistency of a beeswax candle. If you drop a candle, you know what happens. The cold wax medium is quite flexible, which is good in terms of permanence, but it is certainly less flexible than an oil paint film.

We would recommend working on a panel rather than working on a stretch canvas. I'd particularly say that because a lot of cold wax painters are working big. They're working four feet and up. With a stretch canvas of that size, you're going to have movement and you're going to have a fair amount of movement in that surface and so we think a panelist is a great choice.

Antrese Wood: Very cool, thank you. I've been having a lot of fun with cold wax also. Debbie Enderberg Mueller would love a rundown on your new solvent-free mediums.

Pete Cole: There are three products in the range of solvent-free mediums. The first that we introduced is a solvent-free gel medium. The second is a solvent-free fluid, and then the third is a safflower oil.

The idea with our range of solvent-free mediums is to give artists maximum possibilities with minimal compromise versus using traditional mediums. I think we've done really well in that regard.

The solvent-free gel medium, if you don't know which one to try, it's the one I would recommend starting with. It's easier to control just on your palette because it's a gel. It has a body similar to that of oil colors, so it doesn't immediately make your colors really watery and completely different than they were.

It's just easy to work with forgiving, and it speeds the dry time of oil colors up by a day or two, depending on the colors you're working with. For most people, a little bit faster dry time is going to be appreciated.

The fluid medium is what it sounds like it is. It's a fluid version of essentially the same materials, with a slightly slower dry time than the solvent-free gel. But for people who like a fluid medium, it's a great choice.

The safflower oil is our recommendation for what to use for cleaning your brushes during your painting session. We want artists to be able to have something they can work with that’s safe to get into their painting. There are cleaners out there that work very well, but you don't want them in your painting.

Safflower oil, of course, painters have been using it for hundreds of years. We bind colors with safflower oil. There's no issue whatsoever. It works well as a cleaner and to some extent like Gamsol, pigments will settle out of it a bit and the top portion of it will clear so you can really reuse it and recycle it in a way that other cleaners that you wash down the drain you can't do that with. We feel like it's a really responsible way to clean brushes during your painting session.

Antrese Wood: Oh, that's nice. I didn't know that, so if you leave it sitting there, it actually separates so you can pull out the clean. You can have multiple jars if you want to.

Pete Cole: It will. It takes a lot, for those of you out there who are used to working with Gamsol and how that goes back to water clear overnight, safflower oil is not going to do that. I don't want to over-promise anything. But it will, a bit, it will settle out, whereas in other cleaners, all the pigment stays in suspension, and you have that grey to violet wash that really doesn't wash very well, and safflower oil does better than that.

These mediums are not sort of new-fangled in any way. It's a very simple formula of materials that we and artists have been working with for a really long time, and it's basically the same alkyd that's been in our mediums for years that's derived from soybean oil and then an alkyd derived from safflower oil.

You've basically got two plant oils in there that you're working with. This is not new in the sense that it's technical or it's a chemical or anything like that. This is vegetable oil.

Antrese Wood: Nice. Okay. Got it. Then just to recap it a little bit, because I think I interrupted you. You have the gel, you have the liquid, and you have the safflower oil, and all of those help you to manipulate the consistency of the paint and the drying time. Is that correct?

Pete Cole: Correct.

Antrese Wood: Okay, so I have a question for you, and this ties into a question that Edgar Soberón was asking. He was concerned about oil and pigments separating, and I'm curious about the longevity of oil paints, and how long they last because I had this funny story.

Apparently, long before I was born, my dad was this entrepreneurial type of guy. He was an art materials distributor. Now we're talking, let's say that might have been in the '60s, and I was born in the ‘70s, so in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, I went to art school.

My mom being very diligent goes into the garage and pulls out this box that has all this stuff from like the 1960s art supplies. There's all this paint in there and I opened them up and they were fine. How long does paint actually last? Because those tubes of paint by the time I used them were over 30 years old.

Pete Cole: The shelf life of oil paint in a tube is basically forever as far as I can tell. There are some colors that, over time, the pigment will continue to absorb oil and they'll become stiffer over a period of years if you're not using the paint. A sienna or an umber might do that.

If you had a three or four-year-old tube, it might continue to absorb oil and get a bit stiffer in the tube. There are other colors over a period of a couple of years or more that will relax and release a little bit of oil. A cadmium might do that, cadmium red and cadmium red light might do that.

You might see a bit of loose oil after a period of years, but the paint itself is completely fine and the pigments are completely fine. There's not a reason to be concerned about using that old paint you got from your grandmother or a friend.

You'll just see a bit of that separation if you stress paint by leaving it in a hot garage or the trunk of a car that can also cause a little bit of separation and this is true of all oil colors and it's been true since oil painting got started 600 years ago.

Antrese Wood: The last question I have is from Christina Rotelli. Christina says she loves Gamblin paint and she loves your great technical help on your website, but she finds the caps on your tubes are very small and become difficult to screw back on after using a tube a few times, especially if wearing gloves. Any chance of rethinking the cap size?

Pete Cole: I completely agree. I was painting yesterday and I will paint again today and I will drop a cap into the sand and struggle to find it, just like some of our listeners have from time to time. One of the things we get asked a lot and one of the things we steered away from is just making the neck of the tube larger.

I don't want to do that because it's kind of like toothpaste. Toothpaste tubes all went to bigger neck sizes and we all use more toothpaste than we need to and that's great for manufacturers and less great for us. One way for me to get a bigger cap is a bigger neck.

I just won't do that. I don't think that's fair and I think you could get away with it but I'm not going to do it. The thing that we are looking at and working on is different threading that will make it easier just to get them lined up and on, I've had that problem, most other oil paint makers around the world are using similar tubes and similar caps so it's something I hear a lot.

I actually have a lot of painters who call me and tell me, “I love your caps please don't change a thing.” Then I have other painters who say, “I can't believe these caps. Can't you do something different?"

We listen really carefully, and we have a pretty clear sense of what we will and won't do as a color house and a bigger neck that just causes you to kind of use more paint, we're not going to do that. We'd rather you complain about our cap being hard to put on than that we do something that wastes the paint that you've purchased from us.

I'm hoping we'll get there in a year or so, but I agree, and I could give you a lecture about making sure the threads are clean, make sure that you wipe them before you put the cap back on, and that will help, but I don't do it. My caps are as messy as anybody else's, so that will help, but we all know that we're not going to follow those instructions, so I'll dispense with that lecture.

Antrese Wood: You guys also have a product called FastMatte. What is that? What does that actually do for you?

Pete Cole: FastMatte is a range of oil colors that dry in 24 hours and they dry to a matte surface. So why would we make that? The impetus for it really came from the studio. I think all of us have had this experience where you get into the flow of a painting session.

Maybe you get an underpainting in and things are going really well or you're deeper into that painting and you reach a point where you have to start making some decisions about, “Am I going to stop and wait for this to dry and try to hang on to this idea and hang on to this momentum that I've got or do I keep pushing and run the risk of maybe not getting the marks I want because I'm layering wet over wet rather than over a dry layer?”

It's just a bummer. It's just not a fun place to be when you feel like you're really in the flow of this painting and it's going really well and you're forced to stop and literally watch paint dry while you try to hold onto that idea.

That's what we're trying to address with it. There's three uses that we see for FastMatte where it's really helpful. The first is just a plein air painter who's chasing light and chasing shifting weather and you're on a clock when you're plein air painting.

You can't pause. So the FastMatte colors will start to set up and dry as you're working and so for you, you're painting in Italy right now, your early layers of that painting will be dry enough and have enough a bit of tack to them that you'll be able to lay out, make marks over them, get that broken mark over them without the colors mixing together.

You can get that right there in your painting session versus having to wait and come back the next day. Another great use for them is just anybody who's painting big or thick where the fact that oil colors dry slowly becomes maybe more of a problem when you're working really big and thick.

Those dry times get a little longer. I see a lot of painters in LA who don't want to wait for anything and paint big, paint bold, paint thick and they love FastMatte because they can work at the pace they could with acrylics, but with the power of oils.

That's another place that they make sense. Then another area that I touched on is underpainting. The Fast Matte colors are terrific for that, and this is where the matte surface really becomes useful.

All the colors have a matte surface, and it's got a nice tooth to it. As you layer over that underpainting, the surface of the painting is literally pulling the paint off the brush. It's a fabulous tool for underpainting as well.

But the general idea, Bob wants people, he wants everyone to find their flow in oil painting. For him, he's at his happiest when he's in the flow of a painting session. The idea was, how do we get people into the flow of their painting session faster and how do we enable them to stay there longer? That's the idea behind FastMatte.

Antrese Wood: Wow, I learned so much from Gamblin today. That was fantastic. Thank you so much to every single one of you who submitted your questions to Gamblin. Robert, Mary, and Pete covered a lot in this episode. They stuck it out and made sure they answered every question.

If you'd like any of the resources that they mentioned in this episode, they've put together a special PDF download for Savvy Painter listeners who sign up for their email list. Just go to gamblincolors.com/savvypainter to get your free Varnishing Made Easy PDF.

You can connect with Gamblin on Instagram at instagram.com/gamblincolors and of course, if you have more questions for the folks over at Gamblin or you want to follow up on anything that we've talked about, they are super approachable. Head on over to gamblincolors.com or give them a call. Tell them I sent you and let them know that you heard this episode.

Hey, if you want to take what you are learning here on The Savvy Painter podcast even further, join us in Growth Studio. This is where you will take what you've learned here on the podcast and apply it, practice it, and take these concepts from just good ideas that maybe you'll do someday to habits that become part of your practice. Growth Studio is a unique community of artists we meet multiple times a week for live coaching critiques and demos. Just go to savvypainter.com/join.