Glazing and underpainting - for the frugal oil painter (grisaille, brunaille, verdaille, etc)

As I learn oil painting, I have become obsessed with glazing over monochromatic underpaintings like grisaille (black and white), brunaille (brown and white), verdaille (green and white) and other variations of this style.

The idea is to use cheaper paints to create a detailed underpainting of values and shapes.  Once dry, we apply extremely thin layers of paint over top.  

Here's my first attempt at a burnt umber underpainting.



This has a couple of benefits.

One.  Painting is hard enough to learn as it is.  This way, we can focus on shapes and values and deal with colour later.

green glaze over raw umber sample

Two.  Paint costs money.  The pretty colours are usually more expensive.  This way uses the cheaper paint to do all the work and tiny amount of fancy paint on top.

If I am going to be totally open with you about this, Three.  It's not a popular style of painting these last few hundred years.  It often seems actively discouraged.  So I want to try it.  

As you can see, I've done a bit of experimenting so far.  Still have a lot more to do and even more to learn.  Documenting it here and maybe others can join in with their thoughts and experiences.  

(for my own experiments, I'm using oil as both layers, although it's fairly common to use acrylics these days - I can imagine it would be quite similar)

Over here, I document my first expierence with oil beading on top of an underpainting.  https://permies.com/t/40/235117/art/Beginners-oil-painting-questions-oil#2848868

Some glazing experiments so far.

I tried some on my own but ended up using way too much paint.

After talking with my painting teacher about the project, he showed me just how little paint is needed on the brush for glazing.  And recommendations on transparent pigments to use for glazing.  He used no medium and it turned out amazing.

So I tried again and the results are staggering.

I have a lot of these little "10x10" pre-primed canvas panels to practice on because the metric system betrayed me.  

Still not quite at a place where I want to start the version I'm going to hang on the wall.  (and I suddenly realize I posted this out of order, imagine this goes before the above disaster)

One of the things about glazing, underpaintings, etc, is that oil paint is by it's nature somewhat transparent.  And it grows more transparent as it cures.  Even with opaque pigments, some light still travels through the layers of paint and bounces off the under layers.

In watercolour, we use this to our advantage and the white of the paper helps the painting glow.

In oils, it's more tricky.  

From what I can figure out, is the colour of the canvas and underlayers influences the final look of the painting.  If we want a warmer tone to the whole painting go with sienna or umber.  If we want cooler, go with black.  If we want the colours to 'vibrate' (whatever that means) use complimentary colours in the underpainting.

Only people online also say the opposite.  That the colour of the underpainting makes zero difference to the final result.

I suspect a lot of the confusion comes from all the different ways of oil painting.  

But inquiring minds need to know, so...



I'm tracing out six gosling samples to test my theory that: the underlayer makes a huge difference to the final painting, especially when transparent glazing is the main method of adding colour.

And since I want to use the cheaper paints on the bottom, I've chosen Burnt Umber, Raw Umber, and... I need four more to choose from.  Any suggestions?  (earth pigments are usually cheaper, but I'm up for trying some different ideas).

First sample is done.  I think he looks rather fetching!



This is done with Raw Umber and and Titanium white. Raw umber is an interesting colour and one I don't know very well.  At moments it looks grey and other times it looks blue.  

I'm also having trouble fighting the opaque and blue nature of Titanium white. Anyway, it's good enough for a sample.  


Another thing I learned was how little paint is required.  I started with my five (seven if you include the extremes) piles like this.



And ended with only this much paint used



So I took the remaining paint (except white as I can use that for the next sample) mixed it all together, then made piles of paint.  Each pile got a different medium like Walnut Alkyd (Which is my prime suspect for the beading problem up thread), some various mixtures of calcite putty, and a control group of just paint.  

It was amazing painting with these different types of medium one after another as they make a huge difference to how the paint behaves.  I had no idea.  Now I want to learn more, but first, more goslings.

I painted so much today, my eyes feel broken.  Like looking through a film negative.

This does look like a baby goose, right?

some more geese in ultramarine blue and burnt umber




The blue hurt my eyes to paint.  But it turned out pretty nice.

I should have stopped there but I kept painting even though my eyes were blurry.  I wasn't so good at just placing the paint, especially in the background, so it got "muddy" which I don't like.  

Working on green today.  



A change and an observation.

When I mix my paint piles normally, I take the extreme values the colours can do (titanium white and the dark) and then mix colours that compare to them.   Hang on a moment, let me grab a Munsell value scale to help find the language I need to explain.



Titanium white is about a 10 on this scale (technically less, but the real world doesn't match theory and there is no true white or 10... but never mind, for today, it's a ten).  And maybe raw umber is a solid 3.  Mars black might get to 9.5 or 10...but that's a later painting.  

So with a range off 3 to 10, I would mix up five piles using those as the "walls" of my value range.  

The middle pile would be in the middle of 3 and 10, so maybe munsell value scale 6.5-7ish.  Then the end values would be at least one value jump less than the extremes.  And the remaining piles would be between those... (keeping in mind that the photo alters how these show up, so I'm using the numbers of what I saw in real life)



This works fine.

however, I wondered what would happen if I, instead, used the Munsell Value Scale to change how I mix my piles.  

For the green, I mixed up my light to be a 9, my next one to be a 7, the middle pile I made middle grey (5) on that scale.  For darks it was trickier as I didn't have as much range.  So I got a 4, a 3.5 and a 3 (as dark as this colour could get in mass tone).  That leaves the pure white as 10 - and I try not to use it if possible.  

It worked better for my brain to do this way, even if I can't really explain it well with words.  Finding the right paint to put in the right spot was more instinctive when I knew which pile was middle grey - knew technically because I measured, not just by instinct (which was pretty close, but not exactly).

---

The observation was that I enjoy painting more and paint a better picture when it's a colour like.  Raw umber and this green both were effortless to paint.  Blue was too cerebral and burnt umber just annoyed me.  

At least a good goose according to my low standards.

It's also fascinating how each goose is so incredibly different although I am working from the same photo reference and tracing.  

So far I've chosen transparent and semi-transparent paints to mix with opaque white.

A big problem I'm having is that when it's just the colour paint, it's hard to get it to stay where I put it.  It doesn't come off the brush and just pushes around on the canvas.  So that the mix with just a tiny bit of white, although looking lighter, actually makes a darker colour on the canvas than the paint without white.

It's weird.  It makes no sense.  It's hard to explain.  

The red one, top right, is done with transparent red iron oxide.  Given that I was having trouble with these transparent paints, I mixed up some calcite putty with regular linseed oil and limestone calcite.  Before mixing the colours, I added about 10 to 15% calcite to the iron oxide paint.  Then I made my piles of paint.

This was moderately easier to work with and get the darks to stay where I put them.  It also reduced drying time.  I suspect I could make some sort of underpainting putty with some experiments.  A future experiment would be the amount of paint to putty.

And on looking up more about this brand of paint, it already has some marble calcite in the paint mix as the 'filler' to make the student grade paint more affordable without using lesser quality pigments.  

I'll chat more about how the black went in a bit.  It was... um... different.  

Mars black - the bottom right.

This was the least fun to paint.  

To start with, I think the paint had gone off.  Usually oil paint smells like nothing or like slightly rancid salad dressing.  It's actually a kind of pleasant smell as aged linseed oil reminds me of caring for wood tools and furniture.  

This mars black did not smell like that.

The smell was somewhere between a rotten potato and my poop after accidently taking too many iron tablets in one day.  It got in my sinuses and started to burn, so I had to leave the room and take an antihistamine.  I also contacted the maker as their other paints don't smell like this.  I doubt they will get back to me.  

When I returned, the smell was almost gone so I decided to paint with it anyway.  Mars black is a fast drying mineral based pigment so it's often used in underpaintings.  

The word black is a funny one.  We know what black is, but when it comes down to it, there is no example of actual black in this world.  Same with white.  This is why we can go to the shops and choose between 400 different "white" house paints, all of them different.  Not one of them white.

Titanium white - the white I'm using in these samples - makes more sense if we think of it as a very light blue.  Lamp black would be a very dark blue.  And mars black is almost a neutralized red.  Very warm, very kind.  

Except.  It isn't kind.

It's STRONG!  overpowering.  Unyeilding.

I had to be extremely careful to tile the paint, and even then, where I got too dark, I couldn't just scrape the paint away and put the lighter colour in it's place.  Once it's dark, it stays dark.  

I worked from darks to lights, so this makes things difficult.

Eventually, I had to mix piles of 7, 8, 9, and 10 on the value scale (above) and even this didn't quite get the subtle nature of the greys.  A cool (blue) white and a warm (red) black make some interesting combinations.  

Although I suspect that slowing down and taking the extra time made it easier to make a better goose.

...

so which one do you like best?  

Of all the colours used, only ultra marine was still touch wet after 24 hours.

And the titanium white is still touch wet after a week.

I also want to try with a less opaque white one day.  

I think both these problems could be solved with either buying a white that does what I need (lead or some sort of zinc mix with fast-dry filler) or possibly with a calcite putty mix.  

On my teacher's recommendation, I printed out a high resolution copy of my source photo at a local print shop.

The problem is, I didn't think to crop it better.  And since I didn't yet know what size canvas I would get, well...it's better than the black and white version I have been using.



After adding some gesso to the canvas, I'm using a proportional divider to scale up the goose slightly and reposition him on the canvas.  I like having the eye near one of the thirds, so I'll try that.

If I get it wrong, I can always paint another one.  But I am also running out of steam on thjs project, so I doubt I will.  This is probably the last attempt.

I think all your paintings of this duck are amazing!

starting on the clover today.



The green mixes are the same for each, but the paint is transparent, so it lets the underpainting shine through.  This is especially true in the shadows.  

Very interesting results.

Next up the goose which will be done with more opaque colours and the bill/beak which will probably be semi-opaque.  It's going to take a lot more effort to get this right, so I'm glad to practice this before starting the big painting.  

I'm not finished yet, but I've already learned a lot more than I set out to.

And encountered a crazy amount of resistance when sharing this experiment among art groups.  Some of the kinder responses are:

my drawing sucks (it's true) and I need to stop painting and focus on that (I don't know if I entirely agree)

Yes, I am lacking in drawing skills, but I also spend time every day practicing it.  These experiments do not take time away from drawing.  Nor does my drawing improve if I spend more than an hour or two a day working on it.  But it does seem to improve as I paint - as painting is just drawing skills in a different way.  

The assumption is that the goal of painting is to get it to look like the reference photo.  I didn't know that was the goal.  But if it is, the argument follows that glazing is a waste of paint because the underlayer gets completely covered and the colour doesn't matter as we want to colour match to the photo.

I suspect this basic assumption is where I'm going to clash with online artists most.  

My goal is not to be a camera.  I have a camera, it's lovely.  It records the world around me with beautiful accuracy.  What my camera is bad at is to share how I see the world.  The feelings and distortions my vision seem to make.  It's a difficult thing to explain, but I have hope that paint will do this.

And with watercolours, I got pretty close with layering colours - using opaque and transparent colours to do my bidding.  I think oils might get closer.

And the deep dark of the shadow when there are multiple transparent colours in oil painting.  This I think is going to be a valuable skill.

If my goal was to make it look like the reference, then direct (alla prima) - or painting in one go or the opposite of what I'm doing here - style would be the way forward.  I'm looking forward to getting better at this style too.  But from what I've seen of it, most of the time it can't do what I want alone.  And glazing cannot do it alone.  

thirdly, most of these online art people learn art via digital screens.  Some have been to galleries.  Seen the paintings in person.  Most only know them through the screen.  

I wish I had better memories of the galleries in London.  Most were free and it was always raining, so... I spent a lot of time looking at art.  I remember the feeling more than the paintings.  I want to paint those feelings.  meh, it's hard to explain, but there's a spiritual thing that happens in the presence of great art.  Not just great art, but art that connects to you.  Or me.  Not all art connects to all people.  

When I see a printing of Emily Carr's paintings on a calendar or look at a digital reproduction of her work online, and I don't feel that connection.  But in person.  I've been so privileged to spend time in the same room as her work and wow.  That is exactly how the forest is here.  

and last of all, the objection that I am wasting my time painting the same thing over and over, to get just a tiny piece of information (how underpainting interacts with glazing).  This time could have been better spent improving my fundamental skills

I object.

With all my heart, I object to this one.  

Because this goal of learning how different underpaintings interact with glazing was only a tiny part of the experiment.  It was the candy.  I set up the experiment to practice other things.  Let's make a list.
- to practice painting goslings
- to practice painting gosling bills/beaks to see how changing a shadow here or there would make a difference
- to practice painting eyes so I could experiment with different shapes and brush strokes to see how it changes the expression and likeness
- to practice painting the same thing over and over again
- to practice evaluating a painting, then do the same again changing one aspect to see if it fixes the errors
- to time myself to see how many I could paint in a day
- to improve paint mixing effecency
- to practice values - and especially values in different colours
- to learn the value ranges of those specific paints because I want to get to know them better
- to use what I learn with painting values to draw better with values
- to experiment with mediums to some extent
- to observe the dry times
- to observe how the texture of the underpainting influences the next layer
- figuring out what a 'likeness' is and how to get it
- and probably a lot more I haven't figured out how to express yet.

So yeh, it's interesting to share with art groups.  how people feel the need to correct other artists for using foolish techniques like glazing, instead of just ignoring them and moving on to things that interest them.  

And I always find it fascinating how I respond to it.  

Given how unpopular glazing and this monochromatic underpainting is, I think it might be a bigger part of my life in the future instead of just a few experiments and paintings - a phase that was scheduled to end early spring.  

I can't wait to show you how it looks when I start painting the goose part.  

In other news, there are three paintings planed in this underpainting/glazing experiments.

The final gosling one.
The canvas is bought and primed. The photo is printed almost to scale (I ended up enlarging it a bit because it looks better). The original sketch in charcoal is being carefully drawn over in a wax charcoal pencil so it's less likely to smudge.  Still indecisive about the details of the foliage.  Will take what I learn from the six geese experiment to decide on underpainting colour(s).

The class painting
The next oil painting class should be grisaille focused.  So whatever we get to paint there.

And a chicken of course
I got the photo printed large from the print shop.  Not sure which canvas I want to use.  But I'm thinking of painting this along with the class as kind of home work.  I'm sure I'll pick up some tricks and ideas from the class.  

From there I was planning to focus on more alla prima studies, but we'll see.  

Reading The Art of Still Life by Todd Casey, what I'm doing here is a "closed grisaille" where the earth colour is mixed with white to produce values, rather than an open grisaille where the paint achieves values by dilution like a wash.

Very interesting, I admire your patience and dedication. A great lesson. I paint a bit but it's always kind of impressionistic- is that a word? Because I can't draw. I use any colours that I feel like on the day and I mostly paint out the pictures I don't like. The over painted boards snd canvases give me great tones and textures to work with next time I feel like painting. Usually wet days when I can't get outside.
Looking forward to following your journey. I believe art is for its creator, so if you feel it's good then it is good, and I guess like any other group there are those out there who can only feel better by putting somebody else down..

Impressionistic art is wonderful.  I would love to see some.

Although I gravitate towards painting in this more smooth realism style, all the art on my wall is looser and impressionistic to the point of being abstract.  I hope to learn more about that painting style soon.  Although it looks a lot harder as it's about painting an expierence instead of painting a thing which I'm doing here.  

I admire your persistence to practice each detail so as to notice the differences and pick up on errors. I also am looking forward to seeing you moving on seeing your response to paint how you feel.

I'd not heard of underpainting and straight away had to check with Dr Google. I can't wait to see how your gosling looks when you start painting the body part, so it's great you are extending past spring :-)  

Excellent discussion of your experiment.  I have noticed that those who do not understand "experiment" often find ways to criticize those who do.  Can't comment on those who diss you on art as I cannot draw stick figures.  I did see a lot of value to your experiments were I have to read this 50+ years ago when struggling with learning and then teaching the Munsell color charts and the different approaches to painting color charts and lighting color charts.  Not sure how I would have overcome my lack of drawing skill to run the experiments but do think the hands on production of color combinations would have helped me understand and better remember the information.  I have a lot of rust flakes floating in my brain cells now from reading your reporting and trying to remember some of the terms that I commonly used back then.  Good job!  And, I really do like your gosling and would not hesitate to hang it on my wall in preference to some things I have now.  

One of the conclusions I had with this larger project is that I need to put more care and time into the foliage.   So I've been drawing.



I want to add some dandelions to the lower corrners, but to find a photo of just the leaves has proven more tricky than expected.   I wonder if ours are up yet.

I don't suppose anyone lives where the dandelions are in leaf and can snap me a photo?

Not yet, sorry...

Thanks for checking.

I forgot to share this.



I tried to do the top layer as much the same for each goose as possible. Same pile of paint.  Same thickness. Etc.  There is of course human error.   But I think it shows the way underpainting can influence the final colour.

Now the really hard part.  Trying to figure out what is influenced by underpainting and what is influenced by niman variations?

And which colour should I choose for the big painting?

r ranson wrote:I don't suppose anyone lives where the dandelions are in leaf and can snap me a photo?

I’m now feeling weirdly justified for buying dandelions at the garden center.

Morfydd St. Clair wrote:

r ranson wrote:I don't suppose anyone lives where the dandelions are in leaf and can snap me a photo?

I’m now feeling weirdly justified for buying dandelions at the garden center.

They need repotting, and more water, but they’ve been tasty to clip into dishes.

You are a star.  Thank you!

Major trouble with glazing this morning.  I can't find help on the internet, so maybe someone here might know?

I seem to be a bad match for the oil painting group on reddit.  It seems like it would be a good place for getting help, but somehow this got removed.  I think I've been marked down as a troublemaker.  (evil emoji).  No, but seriously, there aren't really any good art forums out there, especially for solvent-free painting.  Maybe permies might become that place?  

anyway...The Problem!

So I did some monochromatic underpainting in raw umber and T-white. Similar to what we call a "closed grisaille" in modern books. Linseed based paint. Right from the tube maybe a bit of stand oil by accident, but less than 1% oil to paint. Not enough to make it dry shiny.

Canvas is about one step up from dollar store, double or triple acrylic primed, but not by me. Haven't had any trouble with these before, even for glazing experiments (which I've done before with this same paint). So I suspect it's a technique issue.

A week or two later, they are dry to the touch and nothing rubs off on my fingers when I rub them. I figure they were ready to paint.

But when I start painting with a very thin layer of transparent paint, things go weird. The underpainting just comes off as I paint.

For this second layer, glazing. I'm using M Graham with about 5% walnut oil to paint added in Quin rose, Trans red ox, and ultramarine. All transparent pigments. I'm putting the tiniest amount on a soft brush, rub off the extra on the cloth, then apply the paint to the canvas. Although it was transparent, for some reason the underpainting wasn't showing through. Rubbed off a bit of the paint, and the underpainting was gone! Nothing left of it.

I did some more experiments and it looks like the under painting comes off with a tiny application of oil and a soft brush.

Why?

Will waiting longer fix this?

Or is something else going wrong?

There are no chance of contamination from OMS or the like as I'm a solventfree painter still.

Anyone out there know what's going on?  I've used the same canvas, paint, and everything for the goose samples above.  This never happened before, but it's happened on two of the paintings I tried today.  

You are aware that linseed is an oil, correct?  I suspect that the linseed may be reacting with your walnut oil and dissolving.  Water color might resist the oil by not mixing.  I am not a painter, but I have worked with environmental sites where oils were involved.

I hope linseed oil is an oil.  It's the most common oil for oil painting with walnut being second.  They are often combined.   Once on the canvas, it begins to react with air and "dries" or cures.  After which, it cannot be liquidfied again. That's why we can use the layering technique with oil painting.

Oversimplified, it's the same process of making old linoleum flooring.

The speed of curing depends on the thickness and pigments of the paint.  Umber being one of the fastest drying pigments and this thickness is usually ready to paint over in 12 to 24 hours.  But for most projects, like this one, I usually wait a week to be sure.

Hi Raven, good on you to put your question in the daily-ish!
I'm not an active painter, but I do love a puzzle like this.
I'm guessing the trouble lies in the two oils, linseed and walnut.
Doing some digging on the internet I found this: "Oils should always be painted fat over lean: the more oil (or fat) in the paint the longer it will take to dry, so, always put paint with more oil over the top of paint that has less oil in it (more diluted with solvent)."
Source

I'm guessing that the high solvent content in the walnut oil based glaze is causing the trouble.
If my memory serves me right, linseed oil based paints develop a film that feels dry but is, in fact, quite thin. It takes incredibly long, for my impatient persona, for linseed based paint to dry! And even when I've waited and am guessing it's dry, it still sticks (painting beehives, stacking them to put away, luckily with plastic strips in between, to prevent worse sticking).
I hope this helps. Good luck!

Thanks for having a look.

Artist grade oils don't contain solvents.

They are basically food grade oils that have been further refined and don't have additives added for shelf stabilization.  This thing about solvent processing is ipthe first I've seen mentioned in art grade oils.  I find it unlikely because it would add contaminants to the oil that would dramatically damage the integrity of the painting like the petroleum based oils he mentions.  These do not dry and would cause the painting harm within weeks of painting.  It might be the author is confusing industrial oil extraction methods with artist grade.  

I paint solvent-free.

Once the paint has cured, solvents cannot desolve it.

These are the same paints and oils I used in the above samples without any issue

I've been wondering about the drying time for the under layer, so I've been testing that.  It also doesn't help that dry and cure are used interchangeably.

The under layer is painted with as little paint as possible to keep the texture of the canvas.  So it should dry quickly.  

The unusual way to tell when it's dry and ready for the next layer is to touch and see if paint comes off.  I find this isn't always enough, so if it passes that test, I rub it vigorously with my hand or clean cloth to see if anything is still sticky or any colour comes off.  If not, I know it's ready to paint again.

For umber, this takes about 12 hours, for titanium white, it can take a few days longer.  I'm trying to remember how long I waited for the goose samples above.  The shortest time was 3 days, but most were over two weeks.  None of them had this problem.

If I paint too soon, the under layer comes off in patches, like glue pealing off skin, but this problem isn't like that.  The underpainting is disappearing into the next layer.  I've never seen anything like this in oils.  

I wonder if it's underbound as this could cause these symptoms in theory. But this hasn't happened before with the same materials.  And wouldn't underbound paint come off when rubbed?  It's usually a problem with solvent painters, which I am not.

It's a puzzle.

It's been a few days, so I tried rubbing again. First time with a cloth, nothing comes off, second time with some oil on a swab, and less comes off than a few days ago.

This gives me hope.  Maybe all it needs is more drying time.  Which hints at the stand oil contamination being the source of the problem as that stuff dries SLOW!  

Testing around the painting, it's areas with more umber and less white are showing the issues more.  



These areas, I was more prone to scrub the paint in, relying on the white of the canvas and thickness of the paint to produce the darks and lights,  instead instead of mixing in white paint like we see with the chicken.  Which makes me sad as it points to underbounding.

Underbounding is when there isn't enough oil to pigment to create a strong paint film.  This is usually a solvent painter problem, and takes decades to show up.  Think about the ones that do that runny sovent wash at the start of a painting.  

But underbounding can also be caused by the surface.  This is why gesso primer is so popular, as it protects the paint from the surface (opposed to sizing which protects the surface from the paint).  This is a new pack of panels so it's possible they aren't as well primed as the previous batch.  This would make the oil absorb into the canvas and not leave enough for the paint.  

This is less hopeful, as I have yet to find a solution for underbound paint that isn't purely prevention based.

I was going to question the priming too. It is always advisable to prime store-bought "pre-primed" canvas yourself. They use the cheapest canvas and the thinnest "gesso" possible.

If you are confident the Walnut oil is good (it can go rancid easily but I think that's more of a smell issue) and the paint was dry to the touch, it must be the priming. Some artists use the "fingernail test" to check for adequate curing before glazing/topcoating (jamming your thumbnail into the paint to see if it dents) but you say the underpainting is very thin so that seems irrelevant.

A spray on varnish could be used to protect the underpainting but that would go against your solvent free approach (spraying varnish is not very eco-friendly!)

Talking with my oil painting teacher he says it sounds very much like underbounding due to ignoring the first rule of working with a cheap canvas - always add extra primer.  

Although it might self repair if I leave the naughty paintings in a corner for a month to think about what they did.

The other problem could be the paints I used for the underpainting.  although they worked before, they are what are considered "C-grade" so they could have some uneven mixing or fillers or possibly dyes in them.  I do  suspect uneven mixing/mulling of this paint.  They do also have a lot more binder separation than I like, meaning the excess oil leaked out at the start and now I'm over halfway through the tube, it's much stiffer and might not have enough binder.

A-grade would be professional grade like M Graham, Winsor and Newton, etc.  B-grade would be student grade paints like 1980, Winton, etc.  And C-grade are the newer make of paints, often made in China (but not always), that don't have a long history of oil painting so are still finding their feet with quality.  These are usually about a dollar a tube and would be great for kids wanting to learn to paint.  

I also got a lot of words about the value of sticking to A-grade paints even when I'm still learning.  And I see that, but also, I need money to pay for classes.  

So I have a lot of thinking to do on this, and maybe some more experimenting.  Perhaps I'll keep these C-grade paints for alla prima painting if they want to cause this kind of fuss.