one brush, one hour, limited palette, oil painting
I am sad to finish this bottle of walnut oil as it will be difficult to get more in the future. More of that at the end of the review.
I use walnut oil for three main things in oil painting.
To start with, it's excellent for cleaning brushes while painting. Dipping a brush in the oil and wiping off the excess paint with a rag. For today's painting, my experiment was to use just one brush, and this oil came in handy.
The second use is to adjust flow of the paint or improve working time (open time / slow drying time). It doesn't act like a solvent, but rather, makes the paints feel more painty. Like when I wanted to do the thin lines pretending to be words in this painting. Diluting the paint wth a drop of oil made that technique easier. It helps that I'm not in a hurry and I like longer drying times. For those in a rush, linseed oil is probably better.
And most important to me, extending the open time. Or, the length of time the paint can be worked. Walnut oil dries slightly slower than linseed oil. Mixing in a drop of oil per half inch squeeze of oil paint, can give me an extra day or three to use that paint. Which means wasting less paint and saving money.
I would completely recommend this, especially for people in the usa and left coast of Canada as it's a local company from Oregon.
M Graham walnut oil is especially nice as it feels ...how to say? More viscosity? Less greasy? More slippery? There is something here that linseed doesn't have, which makes it an essential ingredient to solvent-free oil painting.
That shop I mentioned upthread, that is closing out their fine art supplies. They used to sell this oil at $17 (after loyalty discount). To buy it now is going to be about $40 per bottle. I bought two more bottles at the old shop as soon as I discovered their plans. Each one seems to last me a year. By then, maybe things will be different.
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