Stonehenge Oil Paper As A Sketching Platform

I know that a lot of you think I’m nuts for suggesting the use of oil paints as a sketching medium.  You’re probably right but the typical discussions of this is not the reason(s).

A sketching medium must:

  1. Be Light and portable
  2. Be easy to set up and take down
  3. Clean up must be simple.
  4. Must allow for relatively quick sketches

There may be other things but these are the major demands on a medium.

Numbers 2 and 3 are solved by using water-mixable oil paints.  I use Cobra paints that feel just like Rembrandt oils if you’ve used those.  No solvents or mediums beyond good old H2O.  Requirement one requires a easel-less approach and while I’ve listed 4 separately, this mostly comes from items 2 and 3.

But in addition to water-mixable oils, you need a substrate that’s light and that doesn’t need a lot of support.  And that’s where Legion’s new Stonehenge Oil paper comes in.  Here’s a really quick test to see how well it solves the problem of oil paint sketching.  Please excuse the horrible painting.  I spent only 15 minutes on this, probably using too large of a brush, but the painting is not the result here, it’s paper performance that’s important here.

I wanted to test how this paper accepts a pencil sketch.  Several of the “Canvas pads” typically sold for oils are horrible for drawing.  Stonehenge oil is the opposite.  Its 140lb paper surface feels like you’re drawing on Stonehenge drawing paper, which is wonderful.  Here’s my sketch and the subject.

My typical way of drawing is to use a 9×12 drawing board with a metal surface so I can use magnets to attach things like paint palettes and water containers.  So, it seemed natural to use the same thing for this test.  I also decided not to tape the paper down because I’m lazy and often I just clip my sketchbook to the board and draw.  I did the same here, with a single clip.

Several things to note here.  There was NO curling of the paper as I painted.  Whatever treatment Legion does to the paper causes it to remain flat and prevents any oil from penetrating through to the other side. Painting on it feels very similar to painting on a masonite panel covered with gesso.  It’s just a LOT lighter.  This is an amazing new product for oil painters in my view.

Will I become an oil paint sketcher?  Maybe?  Probably?  I like the idea and I prefer oils to gouache that some find a great sketching tool.  But I still look at paintings that lack ink lines and think that something is missing.  Time will tell.  What I do know is that I’ll be buying more Stonehenge Oil paper when it becomes available in Canada.

Legion: Stonehenge Oil, A New Painting Surface

I’ve been on a quest, some might say a fools errand, to adapt oil paint to a sketching environment.  I’ve talked a bit about this in previous posts but today I want to talk about a new product that could help me towards that goal.

It’s Legion Paper’s new Stonehenge Oil.    It’s a paper that resists oil penetrationand looks just like watercolor paper.  lts surface texture is very similar to their Stonehenge drawing paper that many of us know for its’ wonderful abilities to handle graphite and colored pencils.  This makes it ideal for doing a sketch prior to painting.  I find it hard to draw on a canvas-textured surface, particularly when working in sketch-size formats.

It’s sold in standard 20×30 sheets and, rumor has it, will also be available in smaller sizes either as pads or sheets.  Anyways, Legion was nice enough to send me a couple 28×21.5cm sample sheets so I could experiment with it as an oil paint sketching medium.  I’ll report back “real soon”  as it looks like an ideal surface for draw->paint work.

Can I Do Painterly?

I’ve been doing a bunch of “starts” in an attempt to get better at starting an oil painting.  I’ve tried all the basic approaches (eg – with & without a sketch, with/without underpainting) and I think this has been a positive exercise.  It doesn’t, however lead to things I can post as nothing ever gets finished.

Since I haven’t posted in a while, I took one of those starts and decided to complete it in a “painterly style,” whatever that is.  Though I’m not very successful at it, my tendency is to produce a more illustrative product.  It’s against my nature to purposely try to paint/draw something that’s less than a complete representation of the subject.  Never do I try to include brush strokes and such in the finished result.  But, against my nature I’ve tried to do so here.

It’s certainly less “real” than most of what I’ve done and it’s also true that brush strokes are part of the result.  So this is my attempt at “painterly.”  I don’t think this works well for a single fruit painting (6×6) but I can see myself doing a bowl of fruit this way.  To me, though, the result just looks out of focus (grin).

Painting Shiny Objects

As someone learning to paint and struggling to use brushes correctly, I should be painting a stream of apples and oranges.  I know that but, it seems, I’m attracted to the challenge of painting fuzzy things, clear things, rough things, and shiny things.  This is sort of nuts when I can’t paint the proverbial straight line with a brush but, well, that’s me.

This time I tried to paint a shiny object in the form of a stainless steel stovetop coffee maker.  I didn’t realize it at the time but I complicated things by placing it in front of a window (that was reflected) and by putting a coffee cup in front of it (which was also reflected).

This was a struggle for me and at times I wasn’t sure I was up to the task.  The end result isn’t nearly as important as the experience gained in trying to do it, though, and I am happy with those results.

9×12 gesso board, Cobra water-mixable oils

Oil Paint Sketching

Long ago I saw Cesar Santos, well-known oil painter, doing what he called “studies” in a sketchbook.  He’d apply a couple coats of gesso to the page and then paint gorgeous portraits, that should have ended up on a wall, but Cesar was in training mode, working on his techniques and he needed to organize painting, notes, color swatches, etc. into a book.

That was before I considered oil paints but I didn’t forget the possibility.  Of course, when I decided to try oil paints I had to try it.  You can see my attempt and discussion here.  At the time my thought was that all the gesso stuff would just not transfer well to street sketching.

But, as they say, “I’ve seen things that can’t be unseen.”  Like artists sketching with oil paints on raw paper, Kraft paper no less.  It’s being done as a way to augment a pencil value study, providing color notes for a painting to be done in a studio.  BUT, the results would be perfect as a sketching medium for quick landscape/urbanscape sketches.  The problem, of course is what I reported in the post I just mentioned – you’ve got to wait a couple days to close the book, not exactly what you want as a street sketcher.

I continued to think about this and here’s where my mind went.

  1. When we need to do watercolors on thin paper we do “light washes,” using less paint and water to do our sketches.
  2. Water-mixable paints can be thinned with just water and the water dries much faster (too fast for normal painting) than with typical oil mediums.
  3. Paper is more absorbent than gesso’d board which would help wick the water away from the paint film

Hmm…says I.  What if… and an experiment was born.  I had some paint mixed on my palette, not the right colors perhaps but they would do for an experiment.  How to get a sketch done in “no” time so that I could time how long it would take to dry?  Solution is to keep it small and not worry about the quality of the sketch, all emphasis on getting the area covered as quickly as possible.

I used a cheap Kraft sketchbook.  I create these by taking a generic 9×12 spiral sketchbook and run it through my bandsaw, creating two 6×9 sketchbooks that cost me around $5, less if they’re on sale.  The paper is 120g.  I’ve filled several of them and they’re good for “light washes.”  A Stillman & Birn Nova book would be far superior.  Anyways, this is the result of this test.

Just toward the end of my “sketch” (total time less than two minutes) I decided to add a bunch of white in the foreground.  Titanium white oil paint is very slow to dry and I thought it a useful addition to the test.  Sorry this isn’t a better sketch.  I tried to keep the paint thin and used only water to thin it.

And then I waited, but I’m not a patient guy so at 15 minutes I was sticking my fingers in the paint.  Most of it was dry, or dry enough that I wouldn’t worry about closing the book.  The white areas were still tacky though (no book closing yet).

Then I remembered Cesar Santos.  He puts waxed paper over his sketchbook oil paintings.  I cut a sheet to fit the book and used a tiny piece of scotch tape to hold it in place, and throwing caution to the wind, I closed the book.  I even placed the book in my sketch bag to simulate me carrying it to the next sketching location.  Throughout the evening I checked it and no paint moved or was transferred to the waxed paper.  This morning, everything is quite dry except for the thicker dabs of white, which remain just a bit tacky.  I suspect even this can be improved upon as I put the white on without thinning and purposefully put it on thick.  My understanding is that zinc white dries more quickly but I don’t have any.

This is starting to look like fun.  I really like the opaque nature of oil paints for sketching and the fact that I can prep 3-4 colors in a tin and be able to see the colors of my mixes before I use them in a sketch.  I enjoy investigating my subject by mixing some the dominant colors as I decide how I’m going to approach the subject.

I know that the majority of the three people who follow this blog are watercolor and pencil types but I hope at least one of you finds this interesting.  I’ve spent most of my art journey without much experimentation and it’s refreshing to do some.