Using Lead White in Oil Painting with Cadmium Colors
An underpainting of mine, using raw umber and lead white paint.
Old masters' oil painting techniques fawn over the creamy, textural properties of white paint that contains lead. It dries quickly, has dreamy body (yes, still talking about oil paint), and has a certain warm silver cast to the color that adds an old master's look to your work. I was taught to be afraid of the paint interacting with pigments like cadmiums, but...
Below is a FANTASTIC link to Williamsburg oil colors' blog with a short, technical article about the supposed problems of using lead whites with cadmiums, vermilion (if you've been a student of mine, I misled us on this one!) and ultramarine colors in oil painting are not true with modern materials and production! Hooray! Now if we were only to hear it was edible... Yeah, won't happen. Handle lead-based paint with care.
http://www.williamsburgoils.com/blog/?p=150#comment-5259
I buy most of my artist colors from NaturalPigments.com, and they have excellent videos on each white they make and sell. I highly recommend the company and watching the vids.
Lead white (Cremnitz White or Flake White) has amazing qualities, and the marvelous thing is, depending on the carrier medium or oil, the texture will be different.
Do you want really stringy, ropey white (think Dutch masters)? Short, stiff paint? quick drying? Almost transparent? Yes, you can get whites just the way you want them.
You can also get the additive elements to adapt what you chose. For example, in my cupboard I have mica powder and calcium carbonate (artist’s chalk). I also have mediums (also from NaturalPigments) which are quick-drying alkyds. I can add mica for an almost glittery sheen, calcium carbonate for transparency.
One of the amazing things about lead-based white paints is that they hold warm tints much better than Titanium White. This is incredibly wonderful when working on portraits or florals, I find.
Hopefully this helped you a bit. See my other blogpost on white paint here.
(at this point I still use lead whites and instead of pure titanium, I use Permalba. I mostly use hard substrates and the part of Permalba that is of concern is that it is a mixed white which contains zinc. Zinc is known to flake. I personally don’t worry about this. It’s not zinc on its own.)