Winsor & Newton Artists' Oil Colour

Winsor & Newton Winton Student Oil Colour

Winsor & Newton Artisan Water Mixable Oil Colour

Winsor & Newton Griffin Alkyd Fast Drying Oil Colour

Click on the links above to go to the offers on the Jackson’s website.

Creative Paint Workshop for Mixed-Media Artists

This is a workshop-style book, oriented to the wide community of crafters and artists including those interested in paint, surface design, mixed media, and collage. The book explores a wide variety of innovative and experimental paint techniques. Chapters cover composition, abstraction, texture, layering, using found objects, encaustic, integrating text, and adding digital imagery.

Ann Baldwin was born in London, England, and lived there until 1990 when she came to live in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband. She began painting in 1991, after being a teacher of literature all of her working life. Within 18 months she was exhibiting landscapes in local juried shows. Initially self-taught, she began studying art history, painting, colour theory, drawing and design, and became known as an abstractionist, and later developed her text-and-image collages. As a full-time artist, she continues to break rules and experiment, currently with encaustic.

Click on the link above to go to the book on the Jackson’s Art website.
As always all books from Jackson’s come with a free sable brush.
Postage on orders shipped standard to mainland UK addresses is free for orders of £39.
The Encaustic Paint Department at Jackson’s.
Click here for a video from Golden Acrylics on how to use acrylic gel to look like encaustics.

Drying oils are the binders used when making oil paint. These include linseed (flax), safflower, poppy and walnut oils. They are also the ingredients used when making painting mediums to add to the paint to adjust its qualities. Mediums are usually made from a drying oil and either a resin (like damar) or a solvent (like turpentine).

The various drying oils have different drying times and properties. Mixing them with oil paint modifies the characteristics of the paint. They can make it thinner, lengthen or shorten the drying time, make it more transparent or opaque and change the gloss. Some oils and mediums cause yellowing but dry faster and others do not affect the colour but dry more slowly. You need to make choices about the qualities most important to you. For instance you might want to be sure to use a non-yellowing oil with white paint even if it means you must wait a longer time for it to dry.

The principle of painting ‘fat over lean’ must not be forgotten as any partially dry layers that are being painted over will continue to dry and shrink and may affect the layers on top. By insuring that later, upper layers dry more slowly than earlier, lower layers the paint will not crack or separate. If the layer has more oil it will dry more slowly and be more flexible so you are assured of a stable structure.

Types of drying oils:
Cold Pressed Linseed Oil (Unrefined):
Pale yellow in colour, increases gloss and transparency. Reduces brush marks. Produces a flexible film. Dries relatively fast. May yellow over time so many artists and paint manufacturers avoid using it with whites. The traditional oil to use.
Refined Linseed Oil:
Hot (steam) pressed oil, alkali-refined for artists’ use. This pale coloured oil increases gloss and transparency and slows drying time.
Stand Linseed Oil:
Oil heated until it changes at the molecular level. Heavy and thick it may need to be thinned with solvents. It is lighter in colour and yellows less with age than other oils. Dries to a smooth, elastic, enamel-like finish not showing brush strokes. Slow drying.
Poppy Oil and Safflower Oil:
Natural pale or colourless oil that yellows less than linseed oils so good for making white paint and mixing with whites. Dries more slowly than linseed oil. Weaker film than linseed oils which can promote cracking with aging, so less useful for the lower layers of a painting.
Walnut Oil:
Non-yellowing and dries a little faster than safflower and poppyseed oils. Glossy, and hard-wearing over time. Adds vibrancy, fluidity and resistance to cracking and yellowing.

All seed and nut oils will go rancid (oxidise) when exposed to air. This is part of the natural drying/curing process of the paint. But when in the bottle they can spoil. So like nut oils for use in the kitchen you will want to keep them cool, in the dark and in small, fully-filled bottles so less air is inside the bottle, and don’t buy too much in advance.

Oil painting mediums on the Jackson’s Art website.

Read more here about the history of these excellent handmade paints.

We now stock the Williamsburg colours at Jackson’s Art Supplies. We are pleased to offer an introductory discount of up to 25% off RRP until the 21st of October.

Williamsburg Handmade Oil Colours

Available in 145 special colours in tubes of 37ml + three whites and ultramarine blue in 150ml.

Williamsburg’s paintmaking philosophy:
“Getting the proper pigment is just the beginning. So much of the quality of oil paint is in the grinding. Each color is ground to enhance the beauty and luminosity specific to that particular pigment. Some colors will feel slightly gritty; others extremely smooth. Our Cerulean Blue will have a beautiful velvet, light-absorbing surface with an extremely strong covering power; our Siennas will often be chunky or gritty to allow light to travel through the vehicle, exposing rich golden or mahogany undertones instead of just heavy, dull browns.”
Most Williamsburg Oil Colours are considered to have excellent lightfastness (LF I), with the exception of Alizarin Crimson and Van Dyke Brown which have very poor lightfastness (LFIII).

Williamsburg Handmade Oil Colours

Rembrandt Watercolours

Rembrandt is a superb make of artists materials from Royal Talens in Holland. Their Rembrandt Oil Colours are very fine quality with high pigment concentrations in a range of 120 colours. Rembrandt Artists Soft Pastels are the world’s best selling soft pastels with a choice of 203 colours. Rembrandt Professional Watercolours are renowned for their transparency and quality and are available in 80 colours.

Jackson’s are offering Rembrandt oil colours, soft pastels and watercolours at 20% off our regular discounted price until October 4th.

Rembrandt Oil Colour

Linseed oil produces a strong film but does yellow somewhat in time. It is durable enough to be used in the under layers of a painting. Safflower oil (some brands use poppy or another non-yellowing drying oil) produces a less durable film so it shouldn’t be used for the lower layers, but shows virtually no yellowing, so it is great for the final phase of the painting where the yellowing matters most anyway.

Zinc white is semi-transparent, so you can lighten a transparent colour without making it completely opaque.  Titanium white is opaque so has good coverage and a few drops added to a transparent colour will make it opaque without lightening it very much.  (There have been rumours that zinc white is brittle so prone to cracking, but this isn’t clear.)

Many oil painters have all four whites in their paintbox as well as a lead white.

artist quality vs student quality

There is a big difference in the quality of the colour between artist grade paints and student grade paints. The student paints have fillers and imitation pigments. The artist’s colours are purer and more vibrant, and will mix in a more predictable way because there aren’t additives to interact with other pigments. One way to tell the difference when buying paints is that the artist’s paints will be sold by the cost of the pigment so there will be a series of prices for different colours of the same size. Whereas the student grade paints will be the same price for all the colours in a particular size.

The advantages, besides economy, for using student paints are that they are often more child friendly as they don’t use heavy metal pigments and they can be vegetarian because they do not use natural ox gall for instance in the case of Cotman watercolours.

The amount of pigment in the binder is another factor. Some artists believe that using student grade paints is a false economy because the pigment load is so weak that you often need to use much more paint. Others think that the savings more than covers the cost of having to use more paint. So the decision is up to you and the way you will be using the paint.

Canvas must be sealed (sized) from oil paint to prevent rotting. You can use rabbit skin glue or acrylic medium to seal the surface. Then you can apply one or more layers of primer or ground.
This can be oil primer, acrylic primer or any of the gessos depending on the texture of the surface you require for painting and the paint you will be using.
Acrylic primer (sometimes called acrylic gesso) will do both jobs at once- sealing (sizing) and providing a ground.

Paper must be primed as well before you paint oil colour on it. This is both to protect the surface from oxidizing (slowly rotting) because of the oil and to ensure a stable paint film because the paper would soak the oil out of the paint (it leaves a ring of oil) and there wouldn’t be enough binder left in the paint to form a stable film. Most artists apply 2 or more thin coats of primer. If the paper is thick enough (300gsm or greater) you can probably do just one side; if it is more lightweight than that it is best to apply it to both sides of the paper as the first side will curl and doing the second side after the first has dried will flatten it back out.

Primers on the Jackson’s Art Supplies website.

priming canvas

40% off RRP – Winsor & Newton Artists’ Oil Colour

Up to 40% off RRP – Winsor & Newton Artists’ Acrylic Colour

Plus when you register on our new website you will be emailed a 10% discount code you can use to complete the order, making it an even better value!

Winsor Artists Colours

Oil Paint Bars

Oil bars, also called pigment sticks or oil sticks, are artists’ oil colour in a handy stick format. Not to be confused with oil pastels, they are made by adding just enough wax to the oil paint to make it form into a stick and they should be thought of as you would oil colour. They are also much larger than an oil pastel. Since it is oil paint any exposed part dries into a paint film and each time you use them they must be peeled back at the tip to exposed the paint. This film can be deterred by keeping the bars tightly covered. R&F sticks come in individual bags and Winsor & Newton bars come in individual plastic boxes.

Great for oil painters who love to draw, they are superb for drawing on canvas either as the prelimary step in a painting that is continued with tube colour or they can be used for the entire painting process. If you wish to use a painting medium you can use solvents as normal or a transparent oil bar. Both Sennelier and R&F make a transparent painting medium bar.

Jackson’s stocks three makes of oil bars each with their own characteristics of softness/hardness and drying variances. You may want to try some colours for your palette from each make and then replace your colours as needed with the make that you have found you prefer. Each of the makes also have introductory sets to provide a good starter selection.

R&F Pigment Sticks
Sennelier Oil Paint Sticks
Winsor & Newton Oil Bars