Equipment and materials

Equipment and materials

This list may look long but very few things here are essential. This is just based on what I use. Almost everything can be swapped out something else. Read all the alternative workflows in the tutorial before buying anything.

No affiliate links… yet.

• Computer
• Camera
• Printer
• Connectivity
• Paints
  • Acrylics
  • Oils
• Brushes
• Supports
• Rags
• Transfer paper
• Easel
• Mahl stick
• Palette
• Palette knife
• Sta-wet
• Mister
• Fixative
• Gesso
• Mediums
• Retarder
• Foam brushes
• Tripod
• Lamps
• Colour checker
• More brushes
• More kitchen roll and rags
• Footnotes

A computer

The Artist's Helper can run on Macs, Windows-PCs or Linux boxes (probably). They must have a keyboard and a mouse or trackpad. It won't work on tablets. Sorry.

I run the application on an early 2013 MacBook (where it was written).

A digital camera

Preferably a DSLR or a MILC with a manual mode, but a compact camera or the camera on a phone will do. The application can do its own white balancing and stuff.

I've got an inexpensive Sony A6000 MILC (Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Camera) with an 18-135mm lens, which I like a lot.

To start with I used an android phone (the first three paintings in the gallery). It worked fine but transferring the images to my laptop was slow and awkward.

There must be a slicker method than mine though. I was using a somewhat roundabout route via Google Drive. I'm no longer looking for a better method now that I have the A6000. If you find a good one let us all know.

With my A6000 and a USB cable I can take the photo from my laptop and have the photo automatically loaded directly into the Canvas layer or virtual palette in the application.

A printer Optional (ish)

With paper and ink and whatnots. For transferring generated sketches and outlines to the canvas.

I've got an HP Envy. Treacherous thing. I hate it with every ounce of my being but it will have to suffice for now. I recommend you get something else. Something a bit less… HP.

Or maybe you could use a digital projector instead. I haven't tried myself but I'm sure a smart person like you could work it out.

Cables or WIFI connectivity for the above

Hopefully you have the things above or their equivalents already, right?

And you know how to get them to talk to each other, don't you?

I've mounted my camera on a tripod and tethered it to my laptop with a USB cable. I can shoot from the computer using Sony's Imaging Edge remote and have the images automatically transfered and loaded into the application. It is a lot quicker than using the camera's WIFI.

I've also got an AC adaptor so I can leave it on all day and not worry about swapping out and recharging batteries.

Paints (Obv).

Some acrylics or oils or both.

I've not yet tried gouache (pron. gwash, opaque watercolours) but I'd like to. The ability to re-wet and re-work it sounds good.

The Artist's Helper's techniques probably wouldn't suit standard transparent watercolours.

… but they can work with mosaicking and embroidery too.

Acrylics

Acrylics dry very fast. They are water soluble which makes them easier to manage and to clean up. Once varnished, finished paintings can be difficult to distinguish from oils.

The binder in acrylics can be a little milky when it's wet and then it clears as it dries. This means they usually dry a little darker. The effect is quite small and we're probably not good enough to worry about it, yet. 😬 Just be aware.

Just to be confusing gouache can go the opposite way and gets lighter as it dries

Actually lighter tones generally dry darker and darker tones tend to dry lighter.

The fast drying times makes them great for quickly blocking in the initial base layer and then applying glazes to modify each area iteratively. Each layer can be ready to paint over with the next in under an hour.

Even sooner with a hair drier.

Plenty of artists can paint using acrylics by themselves but personally, I find that the fast drying times make them difficult to control and I always feel rushed. I find myself working with one colour at a time. By the time I'm happy with the mix of a second colour the first one has dried out. Working with each colour separately feels unartistic and crude. More like paint by numbers. Less painterly. Retarding agents help but they can make the paint feel sticky. Stay-wet palettes and water spray bottles also help but it's still not ideal.

But acrylics are great for a quick, opaque, base-coat / block-in which I can go over with oils.

I recommend getting something like the Liquitex BASICS 6-Piece - 4 oz (118ml) Starter Set. The nice large tubes will help us to be bold in our mixing and painting.

You can get them (it?) online at Michael's, Dickblick, Walmart or eBay

I seem to go through white much faster than any of the others so maybe add a bigger tube of that.

I've added a couple of other colours (umbers and siennas), but the starter pack should suffice. You can get them for about $20 if you find an offer. They are always on offer somewhere. A good, well spaced, range of colours from which you can mix almost anything you need.

Originally I bought box of 24 colours in 22ml tubes tubes but I've not used many of them. I have more fun mixing my own from my favourites. The teentsy little tubes made me too timid. I like splurging it out from big ones (fnarr). My collection of 118ml tubes has gaps at magenta and cyan so I occasionally dip into these.

I've only used Liquitex so far. I hear good things about Winsor and Newton, and Golden and I'm also told Artists Loft is good value but I couldn't say.

Synthetic brushes work best with acrylics as some natural fibres swell and splay when used with water.

Hardware store paint. I also use house painting acrylics for base-coats or large, flat, background areas. It would seem that all acrylic paints are compatible with each other. House paints are less viscous but all the same mixing rules apply.

In Home Depot I got some trays of Behr samples that hadn't been collected for $10. Result.

You can't always find really strong colours but I tend to get through the less saturated ones quickest anyway, especially the whites, greys and blacks.

Archival quality is unknown but I very much doubt that anyone's ever going to be terribly worried about my paintings fading after only a few hundred years. House paint is probably pretty light proof anyway.

I've been told Golden open and Atelier interactive acrylics are both slower drying ranges but I haven't tried them myself.

Oils The king of all paints

Oils tend to be a little more expensive than acrylics and can be a tad more finicky to use but their slower drying rates make them easier in many respects.

Oils aren't more toxic than their equivalent acrylics (with a few caveats) but some of the thinners and cleaning agents are more dangerous (more dangerous than water!) so always read the packaging.

It's rumoured that rags that have been soaked in oil can spontaneously self-ignite!

Oils are also no more nor less opaque than their equivalent acrylics. However, I prefer acrylic's for opaque lower layers because they dry fast and you can go over them quickly to get good coverage. I like oils for the top layers because their longer open times allow more control.

You can use natural fibre brushes such as hog bristle with regular oils.

I've read that oil paints don't stick as well to acrylic paint as they do to acrylic gesso because they have a closed surface to protect the paint but a quick Google search lead me to believe it's ok and I've not had any problems yet.

Oil paint doesn't dry so much as it cures by oxidation (which leads to polymerisation of the triacylglycerol molecules). This is why you should not varnish it too soon. You'll seal the paint off from the air and it'll never fully dry. They don't dry well in the dark or the cold either.

The oxidation may release a little benzine and stuff so don't leave stacks of them to dry in your bedroom.

I recommend water miscible oils (WMOs). These are water soluble not water based, an important distinction. They are regular oil paints that are modified with an emulsifier. This enables them to be thinned with water and cleaned up with soap and water so you don't need any nasty white spirit / mineral turpentine.

I bought Winsor & Newton's Artisan Water Mixable Oil Colour Beginners Set - 6 X 37Ml Tubes. They are ok (see the oils in the gallery) but they can get a bit sticky though. I've heard good things about Royal Talens Cobra and Lukas Berlin WMOs so I'd like to try them next time (despite their ugly packaging).

Synthetic brushes work best with WMOs as some natural fibres swell and splay when used with water.

Minor rants:
Miscible (mixable) isn't the same thing as soluble (dissolvable).
White spirit[s], mineral spirits, mineral turpentine, petroleum spirits, solvent naphtha, or, generically, paint thinner are all the same thing (petroleum-derived).
But they are not the same thing as distilled spirits (distilled directly from fermented grains and fruit) or true turpentine (distilled tree resin).
OMS may be safer than mineral turpentine but it's still not entirely safe.
WMOs are much less dangerous than WMDs but are also still not entirely safe.

Brushes

You'll probably ruin a lot of brushes at first with so start cheap and only go for quality once you know what you're doing.

I still mostly use cheap brushes because I still don't really know what I'm doing. A good basic set of brushes can be had for ≈ $5 if you shop around.

I bought a few nice Princeton summits too which are a comparative joy to use.

≈ $3 each on sale. Billy bargain.

I hear a lot of good things about titanium brushes too.

At the silly end of the spectrum some sable brushes can be ≈ $500 each! Just how good can they be? I'll certainly never find out.

How narcissistic would you have to be to think you'd warrant them?
How insecure would you have to be to think you'd need them?

Supports

Painting surfaces are known as supports or substrates. (Oh, la de da, aren't we posh). You can paint on a wide variety of supports: stretched / wrapped canvas, canvas panel board, hardwood panels, paper, cardboard, walls, sleeping friends…

With acrylics you can paint on pretty much any stable surface (but not over oils or oil preparations, they'll crack then peel off).

With oils you can paint on anything that isn't going to flex too much. (Alkyd mediums like Liquin or Galkyd make them much more flexible). You may need to protect the surface from the oils with a primer or gesso. Oils can cause unprotected canvases to deteriorate. You can paint oils over acrylics but not t'other way round.

A lightly textured surface can make life easier by gripping the paint but I find some of the cheaper canvases and canvas boards are too heavily textured and need a layer or two of gesso to smooth them out a bit. It'll depend on your style.

Smooth side!

To start with just get a canvas paper pad. They come in a variety of weights. The heavier ones are almost like a pad of canvas boards.

The lighter papers are great for sketches, experiments, swatches and colour charts.

Some papers may buckle and warp so experiment first. To do my colour charts I got a Strathmore 400 Series Acrylic Pad 12"x9" for ≈ $6. Not really necessary, nearly any old paper or card would have done, but it is satisfying to do colour charts properly.

While you are at it, for nice colour charts get a roll of narrow masking tape (1cm or 1/4" is good).

Individual canvas panel boards are good too. I like that you can use pins to hold your sketches and then hide the holes later with a few blobs of paint.

Start small in order to not to become overwhelmed. 9x12" is a nice size.

Stretched or wrapped canvases make you feel like an authentic artist.

I don't much like painting on stretched or wrapped canvas. They're harder to transfer you sketch onto. I suppose you can put boards behind them but you'd probably not want to use pins on them. They can also flex away from the brush as you paint. Mildly irritating. YMMV.

I mostly used canvas panel board. I've got a few sheets of hardboard I'm going to try soon. I am as yet undecided whether to use the smooth sides or the textured sides. Either way they'll need a layer or two of gesso.

Kitchen roll and rags

Lots and lots for wiping your brushes and palette knives. Also, no matter how careful you are, you will get in a mess at some stage.

Those who disagree have simply been lucky so far. Their time will come.

Transfer paper Optional

It's not essential but transfer paper can help you transfer your sketch from print outs.

Make sure it's wax-free so it doesn't stop your paints gripping the canvas nicely.

Saral wax free transfer paper is ≈ $10 a roll. I bought a couple of different colours, red, yellow and graphite, so tracings will show up on different backgrounds or so I can select a colour which won't show though the finished painting.

You can get a sampler pack of 5 sheets for ≈ $7. Each sheet can be re-used many times.

Alternatively you can transfer your sketch by printing it, reversed, onto wax paper and rubbing on the back. I use the backing paper from rolls of sticky back plastic cut into sheets. Explained in detail later.

If you are made of money you could get an artist projector instead. But I'm not so you'll be on your own and you'll have to figure it out yourself.

Actually I've just looked and the cheap ones are only $40 bucks. Perhaps I'll get one later.

An easel Optional

An easel helps make you look and feel like a real artist.

All the easels I could find seemed a little short so I found some strips of wood and gaffer taped them to the legs to extend them.

This temporary fix worked well so it's now the permanent fix.

A mahl stick Optional

A mahl stick is held with your off-hand to provide a rest to steady your painting hand.

They really help make you feel the part.

Mine is just a dowel with some rag bound to the end. Home made ones have more character. I've also screwed a strip of wood to the top clamp of my easel to rest it on rather than directly on the painting.

I may have to get a beret too.

A palette Optional (ish)

Beware the treacherous lies of the left handed palette.

A surface to mix the paint on.

wood

the classic wooden palettes make you look cool but are hard to clean

glass

easy to clean, easy to can change the background colour to match the toned canvas (imprimatura), fragile

paper

no need to clean

plastic

Sta-wet boxes to put other palette types in

old frying pans

cheap, easy to clean, feel very steampunk

I bought a couple of small panes of glass from Home Depot. Besides being easy to clean the advantage is that they can be stood up on the easel to get their photos in the same light as the canvas.

I didn't put a backing or edging on my glass panes so they were as easy to clean as possible.

Then I broke them and replaced them with plastic panes.

But I didn't like them so much so eplaced them with glass chopping boards and a promise to be more careful.

If you want to spend a little more the ParallelPalette looks interesting. It's The artist David Kassan ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for it in 2015.

Palette layout

There is no right or wrong way to lay out colours on palette. Matthias Schaller has photographed the palettes of many famous artists.

That said there are advantages in using a similar layout every time. Gregory Mortenson has a well thought out layout.

I don't tend to put many colours out at a time, just four that encompass the colours of the area I'm working on. I like to leave a large area for a string of values of a colour with room for variations of saturation and hue either side.

David Briggs: Linear systems from Aristotle to Newton

When I'm using a classic wooden palette and painting freely I like to lay out the unmixed tube paints along the top edge and use the centre for mixing. I use Aristotle's ordering because it sounds cool when anyone asks.

• white
• yellow
• red
• violet
• green
• blue
• black

This ordering is based on the value for the colours at their natural saturation.

I do dark to light, from elbow to thumb.

Palette knives Optional

A blunt knife or trowel primarily used for mixing paint.

Mixing paint with a brush is forbidden. Anyone who fails to comply with this interdiction will be sternly reprimanded.

I bought a variety of shapes and sizes but I only ever seem to use the 3" elongated tear-drop blade.

One seemingly paradoxical property of palette knives is, due to the nature of the mixing action, the more they're used the sharper they get. After a while they can get razor sharp. No really. As they're relatively blunt when you buy them it's easy to be blasé and get careless. You should regularly take the edges off with an emery board or something.

Wipes blood off keyboard …

A stay wet palette Optional

For when I use acrylics I got a Masterson Sta-Wet Palette_(sic). Surprisingly effective. It's basically a tray with a damp sponge at the bottom, some absorbent palette paper to mix your paints on and a lid.

I got one for ≈ $10 but you can make your own for next to nothing if you're really tight. It can keep your paints workable for days …

… when you remember to put the lid on.

I'm going to get the bigger Palette Seal at some point so I can put my glass palettes in it. If they'll fit that is.

They do.

Keep them in the fridge if you can.

A spray bottle / mister Optional

When working with acrylics it's good to have an atomiser bottle filled with water on hand. You can spray your palette and your canvas to keep the paints open (alive and workable).

Get one that doesn't spit too much.

Workable fixative Optional

Spray over sketches and transfer paper tracing lines to prevent smudges or have the lines bleed though paints placed on top.

I bought Krylon workable fixatif_(sic). It was the first that came to hand. No complaints. Except for the spelling.

It's rumoured that hairspry works too.

Acrylic gesso Optional

Used for priming painting surfaces. I don't like painting onto a plain white surface so I mix some paint in first. It covers well so it also allows you to give up on a painting, cover it (mostly) and start again!

Technically acrylic gesso is not real gesso at all. That's a good thing because traditional gesso was made from rabbit skins. 😢

Be warned gesso can set like rock. Whenever you finish using a jar clean the threads before putting the lid back on or you'll never get it open again.

Mediums Optional

Mediums for acrylics

Allow you to dilute acrylic paints to make glazes without losing the consistency as you would with water. They can make paint thicker, thinner, textured, levelling, glossy, matte and more.

I don't use them much. I keep forgetting I've got them.

Mediums for oils

To change the handling properties of oil paints.

Paint fat over lean to prevent craking. Lean with thinners for fast drying for the early layers, fatten with oil for slow drying for the top layers.

Or use pre-prepared mediums like Liquin improve flexibility for any layer.

Venetian medium contains leaded crystal glass powder, pale bodied linseed oil and turpentine, used in the top layers, smooths the edges of brush or knife strokes, adds body and dries quickly to a satin finish.

TODO expand this section once I know what I'm doing. Add a pic.

Retarder Optional

A few drops of retarder will slow the drying time of acrylics considerably.

… but still not enough.

Retarder can make the paint feel … sticky.

Foam brushes Optional

Because they're fun somehow. I use them for my oiling in.

I love 'em.

Instructables has an article about making your own. But they're pretty cheap so I don't see why you'd bother.

A tripod Optional

It's also really nice to have a tripod (or a phone stand / selfie stick). It can save quite a bit of time when taking and aligning canvas photos.

I've got a QingZhuangShiDai Q999H which is solid and was relatively cheap (if unpronounceable). It's sold under many different names. I like that it features a transverse center column which I could use to shoot/film from above when I'm working on a desk (not that I have yet) and a monopod which I take with me when I go hiking.

Lamps Optional

I also have a couple of lamps on stands to provide consistent lighting, but I'm sure you can get away without them.

I got Photography Photo Portrait Studio 600W Day Light Umbrella Continuous Lighting Kit by LimoStudio, LMS103

The lamps and the tripod allow me to leave the camera on the same manual settings so the exposure, as well as the framing, is always consistent.

A colour checker Optional (highly recommended)

X-Rite ColorChecker Passport or similar. In order to perform proper colour correction in the application it's best to include known standard colours in the photo.

I scanned the greyscale segments at the bottom on mine with the Colourpin and got the following:

#3e4241

#5d6262

#818483

#acafaf

#d4d7d6

#fefcf7

Why you should want such a thing is detailed elsewhere. Other scan data can be found here.

They're not cheap though: Amazon.

Alternatively you could find some widely available things with consistent colours and ask some nice person with a colourimeter to measure them or similar ones available to them.

Paint swatch cards from DIY stores sound promising. Then you can make your own checker for next to nowt.

I've got a NCS Colourpin II (a poor mans colourimeter). I'll publish some values for some common paint manufacturer swatch cards when I get a chance.

All sorts of other colour information products are available. Here is a good place to start.

In fact it's ok to use any colour references as long as they're consistent. A test strip painted with a white and black areas should suffice. Your measured paint colours might be a little out but the'll all be out consistently which will look ok. Explained in excruciating detail later.

---

BREAKING NEWS...

I've just found this cheap little Gray Scale & Value Finder which is perfect for colour balancing.

Cost me less than $3 (but it has since gone up a little bit $4.41 attogtp).

Some scammers are offering it for $21.06 + tax. I don't understand why Amazon allow this sort of thing.

I scanned the segments with the Colourpin and got the following:

#494643 VALUE 1		#eff0ec VALUE 10
#615f5e VALUE 2		#dddfdc VALUE 9
#777776 VALUE 3		#cfd1ce VALUE 8
#8a8b89 VALUE 4		#c0c1bf VALUE 7
#9c9d9b VALUE 5		#adaeac VALUE 6

If their print quality is consistent you should be able to use the same values with your colour correction filters.

It doesn't really matter if the print quality is a bit inconsistent as long as your usage of it is consistent.

Colours of the measured code values shown on a monitor will differ from those on the physical card. Un-calibrated monitors can't be trusted.

This monitor is too blue (and covered in fingerprints).

They even have brightness controls FFS.

More brushes

stock photo by Lia Leslie

Because you let the first lot dry out, didn't you?!

They are ruined.

Bad you.

No biscuit.

More kitchen roll and rags

stock photo by Alice Achterhof

I was tempted to stage a big mess for a photo to go here,
…but I suspect if I wait long enough no staging will be required.

Footnotes

Prices are in US dollars because that is where I live,
…but the spelling is in British English (aka. English) because that is where I'm from.

Are there any paint manufacturers that want to sponsor this site? Or supply samples for me to evaluate?

But be warned: I'm brutally honest. Self-destructively so. Long sad story.

The inclusion of a product on this page does not represent an endorsement by me or the BBC. Other products are available..

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