{"id":482,"date":"2011-03-23T01:21:49","date_gmt":"2011-03-22T23:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/?p=482"},"modified":"2011-03-23T11:50:45","modified_gmt":"2011-03-23T09:50:45","slug":"why-paint-beads-and-medium-sweats-and-how-to-fix-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/2011\/03\/23\/why-paint-beads-and-medium-sweats-and-how-to-fix-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Your Paint and Medium Sometimes Doesn’t Stick: The Beading on Your Canvas and How to Fix It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, I promise, I’m really going to give you the solution.<\/p>\n

So, for all of this fuss about paint or medium acting like “beads on a duck’s back,” it turns out the duck knew why all along. \u00a0So did Max Doerner. \u00a0Which is a good thing, because if it had been left to my powers of deduction it would have remained a mystery unsolved.<\/p>\n

Why does<\/em> water run off a Duck’s back? \u00a0Rumor has it (i.e., Yahoo! Answers<\/a>) that ducks have something called a “preen gland” that produces a waterproof mixture of waxes and oils.<\/p>\n

So guess why your paint or medium (when you “oil in”)\u2013or even varnish\u2013sometimes forms beads on an already-painted surface? \u00a0Yep, oil<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The solution? \u00a0I’ll pass this on to Max…<\/p>\n

If, because of its oiliness, the ground takes colors poorly, it may be rubbed off with a slice of onion or potato, or better still, with dilute ammonia, also with alcohol.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A few sentences later he says something similar, but even more precise:<\/p>\n

One must, before using, rub off such canvases as feel oily with ammonia or alcohol in order to improve the adhesion. \u00a0Rubbing with a potato or onion only prevents the trickling of the colors and does not improve the adhesion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So something I hadn’t known<\/em> the answer to for a long time (though I had suspected and experimented with a potato… with modest results) has apparently been known for a long time, or at least since 1934 when Max Doerner published his book “The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting.”<\/p>\n

I should add that I have since tried resolving this problem with alcohol and it works like a charm. \u00a0Just don’t use too much as it will pull just a little color off the surface.<\/p>\n

And I must hand it to Max; he knows his paint… and his painting. \u00a0The last sentence of the author’s preface reads:<\/p>\n

It (the book) is not intended as a course of instruction in painting, because it is no more possible to learn to paint from books than to learn to swim on a sofa.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, I promise, I’m really going to give you the solution. So, for all of this fuss about paint or medium acting like “beads on a duck’s back,” it turns out the duck knew why all along. \u00a0So did Max Doerner. \u00a0Which is a good thing, because if it had been left to my powers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-techniques","tag-max-doerner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":485,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482\/revisions\/485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanartistinrome.com\/plog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}