silver lining...

It has been a while since my last posting and it's time for an update. I actually finished several pieces in the last few weeks and here is one of them that I find particularly interesting. It is done with oil paints I ground myself and just a tad of commercial cadmium red to beef up the main flower. Normally I don't use a lot of silver in my paintings, but this time I did because - well - I made the color so I wanted to see how well it worked. It takes quite a bit longer to dry than the other home-made colors (earth tones dry particularly fast and silver seems to be pretty slow in comparison).

I was playing a bit with contrasting colors there. for instance the background has quite a lot of green in it to create a contrast to the red flowers. I noticed that if I use the silver paint regularly thin (with quite a lot of medium, as I normally do on these pieces), it actually is a metallic gray but not really silver. I really need to use the silver mass tone to get the real silver effect as I have towards the top of the piece.

I used my regular medium that I mix out of linseed oil, dammar and turpentine. Since I did that I read on the Gamblin home page that you should not use turpentine with their silver paint (which is also made out of aluminum powder, just like mine). I wonder why that is. Does anybody know whether there are any bad interactions between turpentine and aluminum?