Month: December 2014

Status
Tom Hudson

RGH makes decent paint. Their affordable prices make them a good value. Not only that, you can select the oil type when ordering white (they have a nice variety of whites, including the all-important flake). For someone, like me, who prefers cold-pressed linseed, this is compelling. As far as I know, RGH is the only producer with this smart feature.

But some of their colors, including large-sized whites, are only available in jars. Cheap jars. Paint in jars (or cans) tends to form a skin. When the skin gets into the mass of paint, it ruins it. Removing the skin is tedious, time consuming, and wasteful. The only way to get rid of the skin is to remove a lot of paint. Knowing this, I spray water over the surface of the paint when sealing the jars. But a 250ml jar of cremnitz white formed a skin anyway. In spite of my best efforts,  I didn’t get rid of all the skin and now it’s in the body of paint. Half the jar is useless–a $37 waste.

I won’t buy anymore colors available only in jars, which means I won’t buy large sizes of flake white from RGH until they change their policy.

By the way, the only producer of jar-ed paint I’ve had success with is Kremer and they use glass jars.

 

Bad craftsmen–a cautionary tale

One of my pet peeves is subpar or crappy material marketed to artists at boutique prices. I will swallow hard and pay premium prices for premium material, but too often I end up paying top-dollar for unusable junk. The art supply market is chockablock will hucksters, con artists, and amateurs.  Many producers simply do not know…