Red Sunset

Alkyd oil on canvas, 7″ x 5″

Red clouds over a primeval land of sharp mountains.

I got these paints in my order from Dick Blick yesterday. This is my first time using alkyd paints. I’ve used Liquin, an alkyd medium from Winsor & Newton, but these paints have an alkyd resin already in them. Basically they’re just like normal oil paints but they smell a little stronger and dry a lot faster. I painted this yesterday evening and it was nearly dry to the touch when I woke up early this morning and dry enough to handle before the morning was over.

This is also my first time using paint from Da Vinci. I got their alkyd versions of yellow ochre, venetian red, mars black, and titanium white. Overall I felt that the paint worked out well, especially for the low price, but the mars black was surprisingly weak.

That’s a very large difference in tinting strength. Since I was working wet in wet (I had painted part of the sky behind the big mountain before painting the mountain, whoops) it was difficult to get dark blacks while using a black paint that’s overpowered by everything it touches. I would suggest that maybe the inclusion of alkyd resin dilutes the paint (I don’t know if it does) but the other three paints didn’t seem to have weak tinting like this.

Other than that, I liked how the alkyds worked out and how fast they dried, so I’ll probably be doing some more paintings with just these four.