Hello and welcome back to my studio.
Today I'm going to be looking at one of the top brands of oil paint
in the world, and then I'm going to test them out with a small painting.
So stick around and find out more about
these fantastic paints and what they look like in action.
All right.
I have reviewed many paints over the years and some amazing artist quality paints as
well, but one has been missing from the collection of reviews,
and I've been looking forward to testing this paint out for some time.
I'm talking about Old Holland paints.
I obtained these from a company called artmonarchs.co.za in South Africa.
It's great to have some of these famous
brands now coming to South Africa, and we're getting spoiled for choice.
But Old Holland, true to its name, has been around for a long, long time.
The story begins in the 17th century in Holland.
This was the Golden Age for the Dutch.
Great Dutch artists such as Rembrandt,
Vermeer and Frans Hals were creating beautiful paintings.
And of course, with the improvement in standards of living,
many rich merchants and other important people, of course, wanted paintings.
And this led to a Guild of painters known as the Guild of St.
Luke in The Hague.
And they started making their own paint.
This was the beginning of Old Holland paints, and these recipes were written
down and passed on to generation after generation.
So what is it that makes great oil paints?
Well, a lot of factors go into it.
The quality of the materials,
the processing of those materials, and just how strong those pigments are.
Sometimes you get cheaper quality paints that have fillers and binders added
to them, and they really have a very unsatisfactory texture, very pasty,
sometimes very hard and difficult to work with.
Besides excellent quality pigments,
you're going to want the paints to be guaranteed light fast.
That was not always the case many years
ago, but today those problems have been resolved, and you can pretty much be
assured that your paints are going to last a long time.
Well, they should last longer than our
lifetimes, and Old Holland has proof of that.
All they do is simply refer you to one
of their great art museums, and you can look at the paintings
on the walls painted by the great Masters of centuries ago.
That's a pretty good testimonial right there.
Now what I'm going to be reviewing today is a selection of their classic range
of paints, and it's basically my favorite palette as well.
So let's have a look at these paints on the palette just to get an idea
of their vibrancy and workability, and then we'll try a little painting.
Well, here are the paints I've got, and that's certainly a pretty sight indeed.
Let's have a look at the colors I've got.
Ultramarine blue, cadmium red light, Alizarin Crimson, cerulean blue,
burnt Sienna, yellow ochre, Cheveningen yellow lemon.
I probably pronounced that wrong.
Maybe the Dutch say it's something like
Scheveningen, but apologies if I got that wrong.
And then, of course, titanium white.
This is pretty much my range of colors that I use on the palette.
So let's get a few of these paints out on the palette.
Cadmium red light.
Let's just have a look at that.
These are tubes of 40 mills, 40 ml.
So not a bad size,
but I wouldn't be using tons of paint like this with a painting knife.
It's something I would definitely use
a bit more carefully and judiciously with a brush.
With such strong pigments, they really do go a long way.
So that's the cadmium red light.
Let's have a look at that.
Spread that out.
And I'm just starting to gauge the feel of these paints
as I spread it out with the painting knife.
It's very smooth, obviously very finely processed, but it is
a paint that I can feel is a little firmer than some other paints.
Although it's not by any means impossible to work this with a brush,
I don't think that would cause any real problem.
It is now coming up nice and buttery and super smooth.
But I can also tell that this is a very
strong pigment and just spreading it smoothly like that.
It is a powerful covering paint.
Just out of curiosity, I'm going to
put out a little bit of Rembrandt cadmium red light.
Rembrandt is also an artist quality paint,
sort of a cousin of Old Holland, I would say.
Also very well known.
Now you can see immediately a marked difference in the hue of the paint.
And the Rembrandt, I think,
is definitely oilier, certainly a few degrees softer, in my opinion.
I think the Old Holland is definitely a stronger hue.
Definitely more intense,
but a marked difference in appearance.
Now, what does that tell us?
I don't believe it really tells us
anything, because each manufacturer makes its own version of a particular hue.
Cadmium red light
with three different manufacturers will all look different from each other.
Let's have a look at some cadmium red light by Maimeri.
This is a good quality student paint, so don't expect it to be as powerful as
these, but I'm just curious to see what the appearance of the hue looks like.
So once again, it's different to the Rembrandt.
It's certainly different to the Old Holland.
So once again,
it simply indicates that manufacturers make different looking paint difference.
The real difference comes in workability,
strength of pigment and light fastness as well.
Time for some painting.
These are the colors once again, starting off with the basic composition,
getting the horizon line in and drawing out a placement of a few of the major
shapes before I get into the darkest colors.
I've used a little bit of white spirits
to loosen up some ultramarine for this, but hopefully for the rest
of the painting, I won't have to use any mediums at all.
I'm using a number six bristle brush
at the moment, and that should be enough to handle the paints very comfortably
for the sort of loose impressionist style that I'm using.
Nice little scene from the Western Cape.
And once again, I'm looking for vibrant colors in the lights.
Strong transparent darks especially, and some cool colors in the background.
So basically the entire range that you'll find in most landscapes.
The burn Sienna and ultramarine really
does make a strong transparent dark, and that's so important.
I never use black paint,
so getting a good transparent dark from those basic mixes is important.
This dark green is also very nice, very strong.
Such a little amount of paint being used.
And look at those strong Greens.
So I'm going through this demonstration fairly quickly.
Sort of the highlights, but most of all, I'm just trying to show you the strength
of the paints and also how workable they are.
This demonstration and similar ones are going to be coming up in a forthcoming
course of mine about painting light and shadow, so be sure to grab the free
course above so you can learn about access to this.
Now look at that strong green.
Just a bit of lemon yellow,
little bit of cerulean blue, and you can see it's really vibrant.
Still somewhat transparent because I'm not bringing white paint into it.
So a quick variety of Greens is very easy
to achieve with lemon yellow, ultramarine blue or cerulean blue.
Now mixing up sort of a coolish gray for the background.
Distant mountains but with just really a very hazy sort of effect.
Putting some lemon yellow into it to get that sort of hazy yellow green.
I'll bring in some red light in a moment as well.
But first get a glimpse of sky just
with some cerulean and white and some cool
blues with cerulean and green in the shadows.
Keeping things very loose.
Still using a large brush,
bringing some red light
and getting these glimpses of warm color in the distance.
But cooled down a lot
with a bit of white and some of that mixed in with cerulean blue as well.
Really very cool atmospheric grays.
But when you do these colors, you don't want them to be too cold.
They must still be strong for what they are.
It's a fine balance and not many paints can achieve that.
So you are looking for something with strong pigment to get that result.
Now getting in some burnt Sienna.
The burnt Sienna out the tube looks very dark.
Every manufacturer has a different looking
burnt Sienna, it seems, but with a little bit of white paint
and little touch of yellow, that burnt Sienna lightens up very nicely.
Very simple to work.
Some cool sort of grayish blues for the shadows in the foreground.
That's a bit of cerulean and alizarin and white.
And now warming up the burnt Sienna
with a touch of yellow and bringing it forward a bit.
The lights.
I'll be dropping in some nice, vibrant Greens in a moment.
So mostly lemon yellow, little touch of cerulean and white.
And we're getting these strong, vibrant pops of color
showing up so well against all the cool darks.
This really is a very quick sketch for this type of scene.
I could spend a lot longer on it,
but as I said, what we want is to look at the color.
Does it work up nice and vibrant?
How much do I need to use?
And is it easy to manipulate on the canvas and on the palette?
And so far, so good.
Mixing it on the palette with the brush and getting that sort of cool reddish
color that I want on the side of these Oak trees.
And this speaks about the versatility of the color.
Whether you mix it deliberately
with a painting brush or you get in there with your
painting knife, whatever you use,
you want it to be easy to work and get you the desired result.
Clean color notes are important.
Strong pigment helps you to get that.
And we're pretty much getting to the conclusion of this little sketch.
Bring in some impasto with the brush, wet over wet
and finishing off with the figure just to lend a bit of interest and scale.
Well, I've enjoyed using the paint.
I think, as you can see, it's easy to work in an impressionist style as well.
I still have so much paint left over.
I'll have to do another painting now, but that's a good thing.
I haven't had to use much from the tube
at all for this quite vibrant and loose impressionist painting.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that little
demonstration and how Old Holland paints perform.
I certainly enjoyed using them.
I can tell that they are very strong pigments.
Although I painted a relatively small painting.
About ten by twelve.
I used an extremely little amount of paint, and yet the painting is vibrant.
There's no problem with coverage of the paint, and it was easy to work.
In fact, I didn't use any linseed oil.
The bristle brushes made managing the paint very simple.
Maybe if you're using very soft brushes
for a delicate portrait, perhaps you may want to add a few drops
of linseed oil or a similar medium, but that's up to each artist.
For me, in a sort of impressionist style, painting it on nice and thick is great.
But with this paint, it's so strong,
I don't really need to apply the paint as thickly.
So if you want to use the best paints,
then Old Holland are certainly one brand that you should have a look at.
And don't forget, there's a free painting course for you up here.
There's more videos at the end of this one with other art reviews.
And of course, don't forget to subscribe.
You don't want to miss the next video. All right.
Until next time, happy painting.
And cheers for now.