Casein 2020

A contest sponsored by Richeson, Casein 2020, is on my mind these days. It's an online competition sponsored by Jack Richeson & Co. Paint via their Richeson School of Art, intended to encourage interest in the medium. There is a $50 fee when you enter--well, when you submit an "intent to enter" form online--but in return you receive a casein kit consisting of about eight or nine tubes of casein paint, a couple of brushes and a couple of decent paper supports. Sounds like a win-win to me. My own kit came just last week. My plan is to make a series of casein paintings to enter whenever entries begin.

Because of the contest, I began reviewing casein works from the last few years and decided to post a few less recent ones.

Hoff, "Spinnaker," casein on bristol, 2016

This is the very first painting I ever did using casein paint. It was actually "milk paint," from Sinopia Pigments. This is on a large piece (22x15) of illustration board, a sufficiently rigid support, and was actually just an experiment. The reference was the cover of a magazine about sailing that was lying about. The paint and its handling impressed me and it wasn't long until I starting doing more of this sort of painting.

There are a number of enjoyable properties of casein, including its handling, but also its opacity. Considering how quickly casein dries, you can paint several layers in a single sitting. The quick drying is a liability too, if you're the kind of painter who likes to mix and mush your colors together; it's dry entirely too fast for that. In my hands at least, casein paintings go better when I manage to make a stroke and leave it alone. Of course that means accurate color mixing before putting down the paint, not afterward.

Hoff, "Fall Visitor," casein on illustration board, 2016

Instead of continuing with the Sinopia milk paint, I soon ordered some Shiva caseins in tubes. The Sinopia milk paint has a thin consistency and is more suited to decorative work. Happily, casein is very permanent once dry and can be used on woodwork, wood projects, even murals.

My second painting with casein (right) was my first using the Shiva line of tubed casein emulsion paint. "Fall Visitor" was painted in November at the height of fall color in our woods across Druid Hill Creek. It is about the same size as the sailboat painting above. One of the great things about casein paint is that it dries to a consistent matte finish that is great when photographed. Another issue with casein (as with gouache and to an extent watercolor) is the shifting of color values when it dries.

Hoff, "Racing," casein on panel, 2017

Casein allows for "chunkier" brushwork, too. In another sailing painting (left) the thicker casein blues and greys were layered over a warmer underpainting in a more pastose way. The support is a hardboard panel, which allows thicker paint application.

Hoff, "Studio Bottles," casein on panel, 2017

One good way for me to work on various painting issues has been to do quick daily studies. I did that using oil paint perhaps a decade or more ago, and a few years later did some small daily sketches using casein as I worked to learn how to use the medium. The sorts of things that interested me in those years were how quickly the paint would dry, how opaque it would be, what the color shift (expected) would be, how to keep the paint useful for long periods, and so on. Those daily studies, which were mostly still life, were small, usually 6x8 or even smaller. In Studio Bottles (right) my interest was in opacity and over painting, and in how quickly each layer dried. It was useful to find that brighter colors still stand out when painted over a darker layer.

Those studies were useful, but now my hope is to spend some time outdoors with casein as well as oil paint over the coming warm months of the year. Applying casein to landscape plein air work should be exciting. I've already used casein a couple of times (see the link below) and am eager to get going.

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The Creek in Casein