How to make your own oil paint

Homemade oil paint is created by combining linseed oil and pigment until a satisfactory consistency is achieved. Manufacturing oil paint is very complex, and various techniques and machinery are used to achieve the perfect consistency and color range. Because oil paints from manufacturers are sometimes stored for long periods, stabilizers and preservatives are added to make it last longer. Some pigments have hazardous materials which are poisonous. To avoid breathing it in, you should wear a face mask, safety goggles to protect your eyes, and rubber gloves. Mix them in a well ventilated area, and very slowly to cut down on particles flying into the air.

How to Make your Own Paint & Relief Ink

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Have you ever thought about making your own paint or ink? Looking at the selection of beautiful pigments, it is easy to see why you would want to have a crack at it. Join us on our adventure of paint and ink making using metallic pigments and various binders and oils. Humans have made paint all throughout history. Think of the prehistoric paintings on cave walls circa The Egyptians mixed naturally occurring pigments into water, egg or oils using advanced grinding kits.

Not so long ago, before commercial paint manufacture emerged in Europe, the old masters regularly mixed their own supplies. They ground pigment into oils and rolled their own pastels. Whilst in our modern world excellent quality paints are readily available but some of us are still just as intrigued as ever to make our own materials — not from need but out of sheer curiosity.

There are plenty of benefits to making your own paint: you can mix unique shades that might not be available in commercial ranges or grind your own pigments from practically anything: dried leaves, crushed up shells, coffee, fruits etc.

Some paints may contain fillers like chalk that bulk up the paint, or toxic pigments like cadmium or cobalt — when you make your own paint, you can control exactly what goes into your paint. It can also be economical as a tub of pigment goes a long way! And by making paint you can also feel closer to artists that came before you. You can find both organic and synthetic pigments on the market. A vehicle is composed of a binder gum arabic, acrylic resin, oils etc.

While this may sound like cheating, it is still up to you to find a good balance of pigment vs binder and this way you can focus on mixing your pigments, coming up with unique shades and perfecting your consistency — without the scary possibility of it all going wrong.

The main ingredients are a pigment and a binder, something to mix the paint on like a glass slab , something to mix it with can be a spoon, a palette knife or a dedicated muller and something to fill the paint into. For this first experiment I selected a purple metallic pigment and poured about a third 1g of the tub onto the glass slab and added a little binder with the wooden spatula.

I used a palette knife to slowly fold the medium and pigment together and kept adding more binder in tiny drops and mixed until I was happy with the consistency. Then I started grinding it together with the glass muller. The more resistance you get from the glass the better as it is an indication that you have a lot of pigment in the mixture. If you find it runny, just keep adding pigment.

Every now and again scrape the paint from the glass and pile it all in the middle. Do the same with the muller as it tends to collect paint on its sides. Grind the paste some more in a circular pattern, scrape and repeat until you are satisfied. I got mine to a consistency slightly thicker than honey.

Fill it into empty pans or any container that you can later paint from and allow it to dry for a few days before you store it. Metallic Purple Watercolour — filled into an empty half-pan left and a colour test on Arches watercolour paper — Look at that shimmer!

I repeated the experiment with another colour, turquoise, and I made a slightly runnier mix using the full tub of metallic pigment 3g , filling 4 half-pans and the paint still came out well. My second turquoise batch filled into 4 half-pans and the purple one drying in the background. The consistency will have to be adjusted to the medium and it is a good idea to have some paint you normally use to compare it to.

This was the hardest part of my project. Not many people attempt making relief ink as it can be quite difficult to figure out which ingredients each pigment needs. It is difficult to suggest a single go-to oil when the professionals use 17 types! Materials used: pigments, copper plate oil, glass slab, muller and palette knife. The process is exactly the same as I described in the watercolour section.

If you are using multiple pigments like I did here, make sure you mix your dry ingredients first then add the oil in small quantities. This can take some time and elbow grease as the oily mixture is a lot tackier than the water-based one!

Silver Blue Relief Ink containing copper plate oil finished — Look at that sparkle under the muller! The result was great, the colour felt smooth and looked very pretty with a consistency that looked very much like a relief printing ink. The method was the same too. Mix pigments, add oil, grind, adjust. Mixing Ultramarine with metallic Flamingo Pink to create a lovely Purple. To my surprise the pink almost completely disappeared as soon as I added the oil. I added the rest of the tub and then another colour as it soon turned out that the mixture was too thin, too buttery.

The ink felt too oily, even after adding a lot more pigment. The colour was not as purple as I wanted it either. Nevertheless, I filled the mix into an empty tube. Now I had two inks to test with the club with another experiment in mind…. Tubes filled with home-made relief inks. Excuse my horrible rolling technique. When filling empty tubes, it is very important to not let air get trapped as it can dry out the ink. Much more important than how the tube ends up looking.

My third experiment with making relief ink came from the idea that you can create transparent versions of colours by adding some extender. Normally, you would add your premixed ink but this time I just wanted to add some metallic pigments to see what happens.

Lovely metallic green pigment mixed with Caligo Extender, the iridescence of the resulting ink looked very impressive! As you can see on the pictures, the Silver Blue rolled out perfectly but I had problems with the Purple Blue. The ink was too buttery and the roller kept slipping on the inking slab. The consistency was just right and the colour I made was really pretty. The Purple Blue, on the other hand, printed in a patchy manner, with a lot of loosely covered areas.

Then she printed the green on a new design she was currently working on. Georgia Flowers — Bird in progress — printed with Iridescent Pigments ground into Caligo Extender — the result was not strong enough to call successful. We agreed that we would need to try adding more pigment into the extender to see if we can get a better ink with more iridescence.

So even though only 1 out of the 3 inks I made was successful, I was happy. It was a very interesting experiment that I learnt a lot from. I concluded that the best vehicle for making relief inks was copper plate oil and that metallic pigments are a lot harder to make into working ink than ordinary ones.

Ink is a wonderful medium — no wonder there is a whole month dedicated to it! In celebration of Inktober, our very own Del Thorpe We have been having fun with Golden's virtual paint mixer: We uploaded a photograph to the website and found some interesting new ways of matching Welcome to our blog series where we cover the basics of printmaking.

Each post gives you detailed advice on choosing the right tools and helps We use cookies to improve our site and your shopping experience. Find out more about the data we collect. Menu Close. Ultramarine Pigment mixed with Metallic Silver.

Pigments and Binders. Making Watercolour Paint The main ingredients are a pigment and a binder, something to mix the paint on like a glass slab , something to mix it with can be a spoon, a palette knife or a dedicated muller and something to fill the paint into. Caligo Relief Inks and modifiers. Mixing Pigments then adding copper plate oil. A very gritty mixture under the muller. Keep going until the mix feels smooth. Add pigments or oil if needed. The good top and the bad bottom ink.

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Step 3: Fold the pigment into the. Step 4: Place the muller on top of the paste.

Updated: June 13, References. Making your own oil paint is a fun and easy way to get creative with another aspect of painting. Combine linseed oil with your chosen pigment using a palette knife. Then use a glass muller to combine the ingredients until you reach the desired consistency. Once you have made the paint, use a disposable palette and a glass bottle to transfer it into an empty paint tube.

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JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Have you ever thought about making your own paint or ink?

How to Make Oil Paint

Have you ever worked with oil paints, and wondered what the heck is in this stuff? You might be surprised to learn that most oil paints typically contain only two or three ingredients! Not only is formulating your own oil paint fun, but it can also yield a higher quality product that costs much less than the fancy art store varieties. Did you use this instructable in your classroom? Add a Teacher Note to share how you incorporated it into your lesson.

Oil paint is a type of slow-drying paint that consists of particles of pigment suspended in a drying oil , commonly linseed oil. The viscosity of the paint may be modified by the addition of a solvent such as turpentine or white spirit , and varnish may be added to increase the glossiness of the dried oil paint film. Oil paints have been used in Europe since the 12th century for simple decoration, but were not widely adopted as an artistic medium until the early 15th century. Common modern applications of oil paint are in finishing and protection of wood in buildings and exposed metal structures such as ships and bridges. Its hard-wearing properties and luminous colors make it desirable for both interior and exterior use on wood and metal. Due to its slow-drying properties, it has recently been used in paint-on-glass animation. Thickness of coat has considerable bearing on time required for drying: thin coats of oil paint dry relatively quickly. The technical history of the introduction and development of oil paint, and the date of introduction of various additives driers, thinners is still—despite intense research since the mid 19th century—not well understood. The literature abounds with incorrect theories and information: in general, anything published before is suspect. Many assumptions were made about the chemistry of the binders.

Did you know that the Old Dutch masters used to mix their own paint? Would you also like to try to make your own paint?

Making your own natural oil paint is not only super quick, easy and economical but it also makes the most archival, vibrant and pure paint on the planet. Unlike tubed conventional oil paints, these paints don't have fillers bulking agent , toxic preservatives, heavy metal or petroleum-based pigments, solvents or chemical additives. You can use a syringe or dropper to make adding oil easier or simply pour carefully from the bottle.

Is the time spent making your own paint just an excuse not to paint? But tell me, why go to the trouble of making your own paint when maybe for a few bucks more you can buy perfectly good oil paints from companies with far more expertise? I once talked with an artist who went on and on about how she made her own paints and the wonderful effects she got. And who can argue that paintings by artists like Richard Schmid or David Leffel suffer because they use commerical paints. To be fair, posting this message may also be an excuse not to paint. It is true that learning how to make paint does not necessarily make one a better painter, but learning more about your paint certainly will help one to better understand how to work with the paint and become a better master of the craft. For nearly one hundred years, art education in the U. I receive calls and I am happy to answer them on the most basic of questions from art graduates who have been painting for quite some time. Commercial tube paints usually contain not only pigment and oil, but also many kinds of additives. In order to be competitive, some manufacturers use low-priced materials, and commercial paints must be formulated for an extended shelf-life. Commercial companies must homogenize their colors for uniformity from batch to batch and for a uniform consistency. There are pigments that are simply not readily available in off-the-shelf tubes.

All of our pigment colors are suitable for use in oil paint, whether working from the palette or storing for later use. Our Muller Paint Making Set is a helpful tool if larger quantities are made for storage. For Artist's wishing to experiment with using pigments, we have special Ocher and Pigment collections in our Kits and Sets. The most basic recipe for artist oil paints involves dry pigment and oil. On a glass or enamel surface, place a pile of dry pigment a tablespoon or two to start.