Chad Meyer

Kelly Craig wrote:Keep in mind, boiled linseed oil, often referred to as BLO, is just flax seed oil treated by having air blown through it [at a certain temperature] to pre polymerize it, so it will harden quicker.  It would still give you significant working time, while doing your painting.  Solvent thinners evaporate, rather than harden, so may speed the overall hardening time as it evaporates.

Just a point of clarification: there are different things that are called “boiled linseed oil” — what you buy from the hardware store under that name is generally treated with metallic dryers. That would be unsuitable for fine art type applications, because it will generally cause your paint film to be weak and crack. The “rules“ for fine art applications are different than other painting applications like furniture or fences.

There are multiple sources of toxicity from paints, but the two most common in oil paints are the pigment and solvents.

Paint (in general) is a pigment (fine colored particles) suspended in a binder (one use of the word medium). In oil paints, the binder is a vegetable oil that can “dry” (form a hard film through oxidation). There are only a few oils that fit the bill there, the most common being linseed (flax seed) oil and walnut oil. Generally, while not food grade, the oil binding oil paints isn’t toxic per-se.  It’s usually slightly rancid oil (we might say autoxidized), so it might smell like oil far past its best by date, but it’s not “offensive”.

The pigments vary from benign (carbon black, ochres which are basically dirt, many others) to very toxic (lead gets all the publicity, but the cadmium pigments still in common use are are much worse for you).  You can choose to use pigments that are relatively safe as part of your painting practice and still have a very rich pallet.

When you talk about “stink” or volitles you are usually referring to solvents.  Some paints are difficult to use “right out of the tube” and need something mixed with them for certain painting techniques (another use of the word medium in painting).  Here, mineral spirits, turpentine, spike lavender oil, etc., come in.  One can “thin” paints with more oil (no solvent) or with a paint thinner. Different mediums cause different paint handling characteristics — too much subtleties for here — but there are guidelines in oil painting to follow like fat over lean. I don’t use mineral spirits or turpentine at all, but I do use spike lavender oil — which I find has a strong but pleasant smell — to both thin my paints in some cases and to clean brushes somewhat.  Primarily I clean with soap and water and with isopropyl alcohol.

One absolutely can have a very “clean” studio practice with minimal or no use of solvents and avoiding toxic pigments.  While I do use spike lavender oil which is toxic, I try to use very safe pigments in all my paints, and I even refine my own oils as a binder, which start their life as food grade oils. Still, good studio hygiene is always recommended: don’t eat while painting, wash your hands thoroughly, clean surfaces when done.

I recently took the plunge and purchased a compound microscope for home/homeschool/fun use.  I also have kids of this age (8, 6 and 5 now) and wanted them to have a nice scope for the future.  The scope itself was only $200 but the additional things I wanted to go with it add on to the price, so be aware of that.  I'm a scientist by profession, but not the kind that looks through microscopes professionally so I was able to not agonize over decisions (I can't pick a telescope, for comparison).  My comments are limited to compound microscopes, as I haven't looked into stereo microscopes (yet!).  I will second the idea to not "chase" magnification. You will be disappointed in the results past about 1000x unless you want to bump up an order of magnitude in cost.

A microscope is like a SLR/mirrorless (i.e. swappable lens) camera; you can think of the body and lenses as somewhat independent.  In fact, if you look at a site like amscope, they have a handful of bodies in a myriad of configurations, so it's best to step back and think of them separately.

Lets start with the microscope body.  It provides a number of features necessary for looking at things.  First, the stage is where the sample sits to look at; it moves up and down (usually) to focus, and could also have the ability to move laterally to change the field of view (rather than just manually moving the slide).  Second, it has some ability to illuminate the specimen.  That could be a LED/bulb below, with or without an iris, or something as simple as a mirror to direct ambient light up through the sample and into lenses.  Sometimes they also have a light above the sample to illuminate something opaque.  Third, it has one or more places to look through (eyepiece holes).  This could just be a single one, and it could be straight up or at an angle.  There could be two, to be used separately (one angled and one vertical, sometimes called a "teacher's eyepiece") or together (binocular eyepieces, which usually have diopter adjustment).  There could also be three (this is what I have; binocular plus a vertical third eyepiece).  Finally, they have something to hold the objective lenses and quickly swap them out (the nose, which can rotate in the different lenses).  There could be three-five spots there, depending but 3 or 4 is most common especially at this price point.

I would highly recommend a moveable stage.  It really makes looking through the scope so much nicer, especially under higher magnifications.  It is the difference between a "nice" and a "cheap" feeling scope.  Second, make sure that you have coarse/fine focus, and I recommend seeking out a coaxial focuser.  This is where there is an inner wheel and an outer wheel which are geared to turn at different rates, but together.  It's a pain to have separate coarse and fine focusers and to run out of fine focus and have to back off, use the coarse, then back to the fine.  I recommend making sure the microscope has an adjustable iris, as that can be important in looking at some things.  I have lots of interested kids, so I went with the binocular+third vertical eyepieces so I can look through one and two kids can also look through the others.  I could also attach a camera to the third if I wanted.  For the record, I seem incapable of using the binocular eyepieces, but I think that's a personal deficiency -- I also can't see magic eye things and I think it is related.  My wife loves looking through the binocular scope (she is also a glasses-wearer and usually just takes them off and uses the microscope focus plus diopter to view things, which means they will be out-of-focus for the third eye, but that's how it will be.)

Next is the lenses, and there are two kinds to worry about: eyepiece and objective.  The eyepiece lens is what you look through.  In simple terms, I'd say go with 10x eyepieces, and no higher.  There is really no benefit to higher magnification eyepieces until the entire optical system is improved for physics reasons.  It just blows up the same blurry image past about that point.  It's also likely that there is no reason to go with a lower magnification eyepiece (at least as your primary eyepiece).  Just keep it simple there, and if you sometime had a compelling reason to use something else, buy that separately and swap it in as needed.  For the objective lenses (the ones close to the sample) you mostly need to decide: do you want especially low magnification (if so, make sure you get a 4x objective for 40x magnification) and do you want to look at bacteria and especially small things (if so, make sure you have a 100x oil immersion lens for 1000x magnification).  Don't forget that if you only wanted to rarely look at bacteria, for instance, you could choose to just buy that objective lens separately and swap it in as desired (if that was a better deal and you didn't mind it).  I have a microscope with 4 objectives: 4x, 10x, 40x, 100x.

I recommend the oil immersion lens, and I don't think you'll regret having it, and I think you'd prefer it just being there.

Finally, there are the additional things you will need/want.  You will want a box of blank slides and coverslips.  You need alcohol and wipes to clean them (even if they say they are pre-washed...) and to clean the lenses.  You will likely want some kinds of stains, depending on what you're looking at since cells tend to be transparent.  Esoin Y is great for plant matter.  If you have the oil immersion lens, I expect you'd want to do gram staining which needs crystal violet, iodine and safranin O.  There are other stains for living things (paramecia, amoebas) for viewing them swimming around, but I don't have experience with that (you also need slides with concave depressions to put their drops of water in).  You also need immersion oil if you have that lens (but they might send you a small sample size with the lens).  You might also want to get prepared slides which will likely be better than what you can make at home (but much less fun, to be clear!) and permanent (though you can do that at home as well).

In summary, you can get a very nice microscope at the $200-$300 range for home use and you might need to decide what features you want to narrow it down to a final choice.  I'll leave you with a couple of shots I took with my phone through the eyepiece of mine to give you an idea of what you can achieve with a simple set-up.  The phone was hand-held so the images are not the best, but that's what I've got available right now; I assure you it looks much better with your eyeballs.

I think oils get a bad rap and it's worth clarifying some things here.  First of all, I don't consider oil painting any messier than other painting; if you want to see "messy" watch my kids doing watercolor!  Much of that comes to personal style and/or technique which is equally true of nearly every art medium.

Solvents are another issue.  I avoid them.  They are unnecessary, especially if you make your own paints and understand how they work.  It is true that you'll probably need more brushes in that case, or you can mostly apply with palette knives like some people do and then just wipe them off with a rag.  The solvents become necessary because: 1) some commercial paints contain nasty stuff -- driers, solvents, additives -- in order to make the paint perform uniformly from color to color, but naturally the individual pigments would have different characters (I bet you see that in watercolors as well). 2) Some artists prefer certain working properties and/or fast drying that are unachievable with commercially available oils.  3) Some artists have wanted to incorporate resins into their paint which requires a solvent.  All use of solvents are not bad, but most of it is unnecessary.  If you start out making paints yourself and avoiding solvents completely, you won't fall into bad habits you need to break later!

Pigments in oil paints (all paints, really) can be quite poisonous as well.  If you are careful you could use them, but you need to be careful.  I don't want to be handling cadmium or lead dust, especially in a home with children.  But, there are a lot of less-toxic options (I'm not going to call any of these non-toxic, but I don't mind handling iron oxide or dirt or rocks).

The oils themselves are also an important discussion.  I strongly recommend you start with oil you can trust, probably that you've tested, preferably linseed.  Safflower and sunflower are marginal driers and are likely to not make a stable paint film.  I've read that it might come down to the growing conditions and specific varieties whether it ever dries.  Walnut oil is a slow dryer but makes a reliable paint film if you're patient (but it might be a few weeks between layers).  Linseed is the classic, but commercially refined oils tend to yellow and be relatively slower drying than hand-refined oil.  The "dark horse" is hemp oil which seems to be between linseed and walnut in drying, reliably non-yellowing and with interesting properties (but not a long pedigree in art conservation, so unknowns in the long run).  The earth pigments will likely help the paint dry more quickly, but the mineral pigments may or may not.

I could rant on and on about all of this.  It's not necessary (or even necessarily useful) to control the entire process from start to finish.  It depends on personal preference.  I like it because there is so much to learn, and in the end, I think I like the learning even more than the making of the art.  It also forces one to slow down, which is the opposite of many "mainstream" and "working" artists today -- a luxury a hobbyist with a day job can have!  If your oil might be aged for 6 months to 2 years or more, your dyestuff for pigment might take 2-3 years just to grow to maturity, etc., that makes a week's drying time between layers to be completely within reason.  But, again, that's my own approach and not universally needed!

I'm still in the process of gaining experience; when to wet grind, when to just dry grind, when and how many times to wash, etc.  I don't have any equipment (rock smasher or ball mill), just hammer and mortar and pestle.  

I'd love to try (at least once) to put together a painting as completely as possible from locally sourced, and homemade materials.  I'm imagining growing flax for the fiber (to make linen canvas) AND the oil, pressing and refining it by hand (or collecting local walnuts and preparing oil from them), collecting pigments from the earth, growing dyestuff and making my own lake pigments, maybe doing some home chemistry.  Riving and preparing lumber from my own tree to make a panel or stretcher bars, or frames.

Of course, there are limits; I'm unlikely to make my own palette knife or mold my own muller or make a flat glass sheet.  Some materials (chalk, for instance) might just not be easy to dig up.

To me, the only thing that I need in "working space" for oils that I wouldn't need for watercolors is somewhere to leave the painting to dry in the light for a while without any children touching it.  I really like the feel of oil paints, and homemade paints are able to achieve a whole range of working properties that commercial paints just don't have.  I'd also like to try egg tempera (which you could start with just pigments and egg or mull them in water or another aqueous dispersion first).  

I've never tried to make maya pigments; to be honest before I read it here I didn't know it was possible to do at home.  I've read that they have really good working properties in paint due to the clay content, and the way the dyes are absorbed into the clay can impart surprising lightfastness to otherwise fugitive dyes.  The company that had been making them had produced maybe 6-8 different "maya" pigments (though they seem to have mostly folded), and I have no idea what kinds of colorants they were able to do this with.

I love trying to grow new things, which often means failure and sometimes disappointment, but this thread wants to focus on the favorites, which is good!

I'm most excited about Okra!  This is the third year I've tried to grow okra, but the first which is actually producing pods.  The plants look pitiful and short, BUT they have been blooming and producing pods.  I have either three or four phenotypes expressed among the diverse seeds I started with.  I've made the decision to not harvest the first pods on any plants, hoping those will contribute seed for next year more adapted to my garden.  I've got high hopes!

I'm growing peanuts for the first time this year as well; not sure whether they are growing nuts underground or not, but the tops and blooms look healthy enough.  Tepary beans are also a first for me.  They grew well, and I've been collecting beans as they dry; looking forward to doing a better job cultivating them next year.

I've been experimenting with producing pigments and making handmade oil paints of late, and was excited to see other people here thinking along the same lines.

We have a lot of "good dirt" for pigment making here in Northern New Mexico (Georgia O'Keeffe country).  A short walk from my house is a nice deposit of of a white clay (which can make a buff off-white, or be used in addition to other colors to change the chroma or working properties).  And, around, there are many kinds of reds and even deep purple hematities.  Unfortunately a lot of that is on either public or tribal lands and securing permissions to collect them is difficult/impossible.

I made a lamp black by scraping soot from the top of the fireplace, then washing it.  It resists dispersion, but makes a nice deep (and complex) blue-black.  I've also ground up some rocks; the most promising seems be be our local basalt which makes a rather luminous grey.  I find that the earth and oxide pigments benefit from and/or require long mulling to really smooth out the colors and bring out the full chroma of the color, but that might be different in watercolors.  My wife is the watercolorist in the family, and has expressed willingness to try some homemade watercolors, if I find a particularly striking/useful pigment.

I'd like to branch into plant-based lake pigments next -- combining my gardening habit with the painting!  The classic, moderately lightfast colors are madder (pink/red), indigo and/or woad for blues and weld for yellow.  In the past, I've only been interested in absolutely lightfast colors, but I've decided it would be fun to try organic colors that I've grown myself.  In some cases the pigment can be considerably more lightfast than the dye, so there is still scope to find new useful combinations (especially among new-world plants).

I live in the mountains of Northern New Mexico, and the USDA line between 6b and 7a runs right through the neighborhood. Century plants grow reliably here (we had one bloom just up the street a couple of years back, so you know it was a survivor!). They grow semi-wild on the sides of the roads in the mountains, where it freezes pretty hard. I would worry more about the water level in the soil; I don’t think our dirt freezes quite as hard, because when it gets to that time of year it’s usually pretty dry.

If you go to his website, he says that the book is available from amazon or from lulu.com (which is a print-on-demand service).  He also states that he earns a higher commission from the lulu purchases, so that might be a better place to order from anyway (if you're willing to wait the extra time).

Having thought about this over the past week, and in light of other comments made this week, I think it's safe to say that I'm overthinking things (that's what I always do)!

If I am growing out 10 different (named or otherwise) varieties of common bean that would "breed true" as they say, and if I'm growing them side-by-side or all interplanted, and I save seeds and try to regrow whatever produced beans while maintaining some notion of diversity (e.g. at minimum planting all the colors/patterns of beans I've saved), then I've already got more diversity in my garden than in most seed packets -- and the corresponding resilience that brings -- independent of how much the bees manage to produce hybrids and independent of whether I end up preferentially selecting those hybrids or not.

So, whether what I'm growing ends up being a "landrace" or "grex" or "hybrid swarm" or just a bunch of varieties grown together, I'm still reaping the benefits of diversity in my garden and likely to have that pay dividends as time goes on.