I put a bowl of raw umber on the radiator and now it's the only ground I want
Not on purpose. I left the little glass dish there Saturday after cleaning brushes, forgot it, and found it Monday soft as butter, almost dripping off the palette knife. Ground it warm and it went onto the canvas differently than the tube ever does. Covers three times faster, and the transparency, voilà, that's the thing I've been chasing for a month on this drapery and couldn't get with medium.
So now I'm warming pigment on a radiator like an idiot. I have a small ceramic bowl, I put the lumps in it in the morning, and by two o'clock it's workable. The tube stuff seems dead to me this week. I keep a thermometer near the window because the studio drops to 15 in the morning and I want to know when I've crossed into the good range.
Downside: I left one batch too long Thursday, came back and it had skinned. Forty grams gone. My daughter asked why the studio smells like a bakery and honestly I don't know what to tell her.
Somebody here must grind their own with a muller. Do you warm the slab or just accept it cold? I'm half a step from buying a heating pad for this and I'd rather hear I'm not the only one before I do.
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Careful with the umber, it's a lead one usually, and warm lead pigment on skin for a month will find you. But I know exactly the thing you're describing. Warm oil is thinner and the pigment wets differently, it's like the difference between cold butter and melted on bread. If you want to keep it without inventing a radiator ritual, a yoghurt maker on the low setting or an old baby bottle warmer does the same job and doesn't dry the surface out. Just don't leave it there all week, the oil will start to skin over and you'll be grinding it again anyway. Half the pleasure is probably that the paint surprises you for once, tube is too polite.
ok the lead thing is real and I say that as someone who has absolutely handled burnt umber with my bare hands for years like an idiot. but the butter on bread comparison is exactly it. warm oil wets the pigment, cold oil just sits on top of it and you fight it the whole way down the canvas.
what gets me is the last line. "half the pleasure is probably that the pain." yeah. I've made peace with the fact that I do not trust anything that came easy, in paint or otherwise.
I like that you kept the bare hands and just admitted it. Honest.
But "I do not trust anything that came easy" is where I'd push back a little. Some things come easy because you paid for them years ago. The first pass on a head sometimes falls in like nothing, and that isn't luck, it's that you can finally see it. What I don't trust is the easy thing that arrives before you've done the work, c'est ça. The other kind I'll take gladly.
Still, I know the feeling. Half of why I like this radiator trick is that the pigment makes me wait for it.
The lead warning I'll take, that's fair, though raw umber and burnt umber are the iron ones, the lead family is lead white, Naples yellow, the chrome yellows. If you meant I should check the tube, c'est ça, I should. Mine says PBr7. But your point stands for anyone reading who paints with the others, so thank you for it.
It's the yoghurt maker that gets me. You're right that it would work and I hate that it would. There's something about the bowl on the radiator that I think is doing half the job, some small ritual of it being warm because the room is. Anyway. Noted on the skin forming, I've been scraping the top and re-wetting which is a waste of pigment, so I'll just make less at a time.