{"id":1173,"date":"2017-06-01T10:27:45","date_gmt":"2017-06-01T15:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/twillpower.com\/thrums\/?p=330"},"modified":"2017-06-01T10:27:45","modified_gmt":"2017-06-01T15:27:45","slug":"first-casein-sketch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/?p=1173","title":{"rendered":"First Casein Sketch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve become fascinated with casein paint, mostly because it&#8217;s water soluble and can be used like a transparent watercolor or an opaque gouache or even like a thicker, heavier acrylic. It also dries to an impermeable surface which can be left alone, varnished for an oil painting appearance, put under glass, or displayed in a frame. In other words, it&#8217;s versatile.<\/p>\n<p>I bought a six-color kit and practiced a little on my watercolor paper. Used thinly, supposedly it won&#8217;t crack after it&#8217;s dried. I&#8217;ve learned a lot in less than an hour:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Casein dries on the palette quickly. It turns thicker and thicker until it goes from a smooth, velvety texture to a gluey texture. At that point, you need more water to get the paint onto the surface, and that extra amount of water will thin the paint so it&#8217;s not as opaque. I&#8217;m going to experiment with a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_DMPPqgeZKk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">wet palette<\/a> to keep the paint fluid for a longer amount of time.<\/li>\n<li>Casein is truly opaque, which means one layer will totally cover the first layer (when the first layer is dried). This is so different from watercolor that it&#8217;ll take some thoughtful practice to get used to it. For example, when painting the windows on the houses, I kept painting around the edges. Only at the end did I realize I could paint directly over the wall of the house to create a window.<\/li>\n<li>Casein can be mixed on the palette, but when it&#8217;s still wet on the paper, it can also be mixed on the surface. I think this is a matter of skill\u00a0as the paint doesn&#8217;t blossom like watercolor. It&#8217;s far more subtle.<\/li>\n<li>You can use two colors on your brush to create super cool effects.<\/li>\n<li>White doesn&#8217;t appear as\u00a0pure white when layered over other colors, at least not for me. It seems to show color beneath. I suspect you need to use fairly thick paint with nearly no water to get white to obliterate the color below. So, perhaps,\u00a0when the painting is nearly done, putting down a fresh bit of white paint to use is the best bet.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The little painting is from a 1950 book by Henry M. Gasser, <em>Casein Painting: Methods and Demonstrations<\/em>. This first example is using casein watered-down, more like transparent watercolor. I simplified it tremendously, not wanting to paint two dozen teeny houses. It&#8217;s funny how crooked my houses are&#8211;can you tell I did this at the end of a very long day? I was super excited to try the paints and wasn&#8217;t content with doing the color sampler.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-329\" src=\"http:\/\/twillpower.com\/thrums\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_0588.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"1015\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/jamesgurney.com\/site\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Artist James Gurney<\/a>\u00a0is a fan of casein and is probably the reason why I bumped into it in the first place. He <a href=\"http:\/\/gurneyjourney.blogspot.com\/search\/label\/Casein%20Painting\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">writes about it on his blog<\/a> and has numerous <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2TCunOMt1Ew&amp;list=PLRba1gHgLtJC7OesSnUO7VZ6tiwFLi60G\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">short videos painting en plein air<\/a>. Truthfully, although artists use this medium, there isn&#8217;t a tremendous amount of current information about it, even though it&#8217;s the oldest known paint and was used in ancient cave paintings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve become fascinated with casein paint, mostly because it&#8217;s water soluble and can be used like a transparent watercolor or an opaque gouache or even like a thicker, heavier acrylic. It also dries to an impermeable surface which can be left alone, varnished for an oil painting appearance, put under glass, or displayed in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[380,382],"tags":[356,387,379],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-casein","tag-art","tag-casein","tag-painting"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3wmm6-iV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horsenettle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}