|
Fat over lean, as I understand it, means that each day you work on a painting, your paint must contain a higher percentage of oil than it did yesterday. So, if you used a drop of medium in your paint today, tomorrow, you can use a drop or two also, but it must contain more oil than it did the day before.
I know one artist who has mixed about ten versions of the stand oil-turp-varnish mixture so that each mixture contains a bit more oil and a bit less of the other two ingredients. He has a three-to-one (oil) mix, a four-to-one, a five-to-one, and so on out to about 10 variations. If the painting takes, say, eight days, he used the medium that is more oil by that much for that day's work.
It's not only the medium that need to be more oily as time passes, but it is the medium THAT YOU MIX WITH YOUR PAINT that needs to be more oily so that the top layers will dry more slowly than the lower layers, and thus, retard cracking.
As I understand it, if you're going to glaze, you need to wait untill ALL your paint is dry before applying a glaze. By its nature, a glaze is just a tiny amount of paint mixed with a large amount of medium. This thin mix (more medium - less paint) will probably dry rather quickly on top of your fat paint.
There are some artists (Richard Schmid is one) who say that the only reason you should glaze is because you want to be mean to your self, and your so bored you don't have anything else to do except watch paint dry.
|