Mixing Media in Paintings: Learn Some of the Precautions You Should Take

I’m not a purist. I believe in adding pigments and materials to a painting to achieve an effect or deliver a message. Experimenting can an an added dimension to you work.

Archival Quality Materials: The piece pictured above is a combination of papers, graphite, watercolor and colored pencil. The key to having your work last for decades or more is to take as many precautions with your materials as you can. Use archival papers and archival quality glues or acrylic medium in collages such as these.

Aggregates: Adding found objects can add an interesting dimensional to your work. In the last century of painting history, painters have been less concerned with technical knowledge and more concerned with innovation, often combining organic materials such as tobacco, sawdust or coffee grounds to paint for texture, adding metallic pieces which could eventually rust to canvas and usually combinations of media and adhesives that were never meant to be used together. The safer bet is to try one of the numerous acrylic textured gels that will give the same effect but have been manufactured to prevent deterioration.

Mixing Paints: I recently experimented with mixing acrylic paints with rubbing alcohol. Beautiful, irresistible colors but whether they’ll deteriorate over the decades is anybody’s guess. The same can be said about thinning oils simply with turpentine or another solvent. It disrupts the basic structure of the paint – and can cause a wide range of deterioration in paintings from yellowing to cracking. Learning basic mixing techniques can prevent a wide range of common oil painting problems.

Oil Paints & Acrylics: There seems to be no disadvantage to using acrylic paints over an oil painting, most commonly for fine details, but according to the law of “fat over lean” it is not advisable to paint over acrylics with oil colors or glazes.

Oil Paints & Paper: The oil in oil pigments will sink into paper and disintegrate the paper’s fibers in a relatively short period of time. A perfectly acceptable method for reference sketching but consider this work non-permanent.

Color Mixing Bible: All You’Ll Ever Need to Know About Mixing Pigments in Oil, Acrylic, Watercolor, Gouache, Soft Pastel, Pencil, and Ink

Mixing colors accurately may be an art unto itself. In fact, many artists are discouraged by the time and expense it takes to mix and match colors, and achieve the right results. Even more frustrating is the vast range of colors available. Now there’s a ready-to-use visual directory that takes all the guesswork out of mixing and matching colors… making every artist an expert! Color Mixing Bible provides a basic color palette for each art medium, demonstrating an array of two-, three-, and four-color mixes, as well as offering full explanations of various paints and pigments.

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