The CORRECT Way to Use LIQUIN

Good information for those that haven't used it before. It is indeed a great medium if you know how to use it correctly and its properties appeal to your working style. The semi gloss and speed of drying are unparalleled, especially when painting in multiple very thin layers, Please allow me to add some information that might prevent some frustration in new users of Liquin: This medium dries faster than you might imagine. Even after only 1 hour, you feel a noticible difference in consistency. I would therefore NOT recommend to mix all colors with Liquin at the start of your session, especially if your sessions take usually longer than 1 hour. After 3 hours, it will be so sticky that you won't be able to paint smooth brushstrokes! My advice is, to put only a little bit of Liquin on the palet (you can always add more later) and add it only at the moment of mixing your paint. Keep the thread on the bottle and the cap absolutely clean, otherwise it can get really difficult to open it the next time. I don't pour it out, but let it flow only right up to the opening and scoop some out with a palet knife. Wipe off used palet knives immediately after use. When you're switching brushes during your session and expect a certain brush not to used for a while, wipe the remaining paint/Liquin mixture off with a cloth or paper towel.

I’m a senior who took up painting later in life. I am so grateful for the instruction and education you’ve shared here. I’ve been using Liquin incorrectly, and I think my painting is going to improve greatly from learning how it should be used. Happy to have found your channel. Thankyou.

I'm a completely amateur in drawing/painting and i highly appreciate you making the time to answer every single question in the comments. You're literally so kind 🥺

Great info! A tip I got from another artist is to keep your liquin in a squeeze bottle, only doling out the amount you need on each individual paint. No mess, none leftover, and less unnecessary toxin exposed.

I have painted mostly with acrylic for half a century. I love using oil for its blending ability. One thing I would again warn people is to ventilate their work area. I have lost several artist friends to cancer who were exposed to solvents daily... Great video. Thanks.

From my ten years experience of oil painting , Linseed Oil must be added with Liquin to the Tube Oil paint at a ratio of approxiametely 20% : 15% : 65%. Mix it thoroughly until it becomes a creamy smooth paste. Important note :1) shake the bottle of Liquin thoroughly before using. 2) squeeze and massage the tube of paint before opening , this mixes the contents and prevents , linseed oil dribbling out of tube.

As he mentions, the vapor is harmful because Liquin is a type of alkyd resin, nasty smelly stuff! For sensitive painters, look to Natural Pigments, they make an excellent pretty much odorless alternative that I switched to called Oleogel, although slower drying than Liquin. They also make some great non toxic putty and impasto mediums, long before Winsor Newton. And an amazing selection of paint (Rublev) that include unusual and historic pigments.

Just purchased my first bottle of Liquin and realised I needed good info on its use! Found your video so helpful and full of information on use of Liquin and also the safety aspects. Many thanks. Can’t wait to give it a try now..

I'm from New Zealand, but I'd be surprised if the cap thread sizes were different. I replace the childproof caps with the caps from our local wine bottle tops. We've largely given up on the use of cork for wine bottles, and the replacement wine caps fit perfectly. I use those with the silvered inner seal like those inside the childproof medium tops. Six months on , no drying mediums, strange reactions or sticking caps. The childproofs seem to be fine until they gum up with medium, and I've found this solution to be excellent. I rince first with plain water to remove wine traces and set aside to dry for a few days incase there's a trace of water hidden under the seal edge. I imagine there maybe other bottle tops that work just as well.

Extremely helpful video! I've been painting in oils for 20 years and I'm just now starting to look into mixing Liquin Original into my paints so that I don't have to wait forever for my paintings to dry. You have given me some excellent advice and I appreciate your expertise on this subject. I'll be looking into your other videos. Thanks mucho!

Thank you! Confusion over mediums kept me away from oils for years until I found liquid. Now, with your help, I understand more about how I should be using it.

Im glad you addressed the whole "Oil painting is toxic" thing which many youtube artists bleat on about, and puts off many new people - which irritates me greatly. Common sense approach and research the medium - you could argue any paint medium can be toxic lol. Liquin I avoided for sometime, was skeptical of it and enjoyed the linseed and turps approach lol. Then one day i though lets give this stuff a go .... And i was impressed with it.

Wow! I am new to oil painting and a friend told me to use Liquin to speed drying time. I am really glad I watched your video to find out the correct way to use it. Great information.

Liquin is an alkyd product, that means it is not subject to the "sinking in" effects of linseed oil and other oil based mediums. (The drying out of the oil film as the pigments dry and soak up the oils, causing a matte area of lighter tones because of the lessened refractive index.) 20% Liquin is about the maximum amount you should mix into your paint, and 20% and more WILL yellow your pigments to a slight extent. Because Liquin is an alkyd, it's considered a resin, not an oil. Resins yellow, and can also "cry". Crying is when they begin to separate out of the oil film, due to over mixing them into the oil medium. This is less an issue for alkyds, but others such as amber, casin or pine resins have this problem to bear in mind. Fat over Lean refers to the fat content in the medium, whereas thick over thin is how to apply such layers in succession. You got the basic idea, but... that is not how Liquin or alkyd products cure, they are not oils, technically they are resin soaps. They respire solvents at which time they solidify, very much like acrylics except instead of water, they respire solvents. This is why if they are trapped behind oil layers they can "cry" years after the painting has seemingly dried. Natural Pigments (Rublev) recommends steering away from any resins in a painting for the best, longest lasting paint film possible. Delaminations occur when a paint layer with alkyds is used underneath below an oil based medium, then much later, possibly decades later, the alkyd begins to move separate from the motion that the oil medium layer moves, neither can adhere to one another due to micro "crying" between layers and one pulls away from the other.

Liquin is a fantastic medium although it used to irritate my throat so I stopped using it.

Really good info. Thanks! I’ve only just started oil painting (coming from acrylics & watercolor). I did a bunch of research first, but because I don’t have a big studio, don’t want to have to deal with open windows & such for every single painting session (if I start using turpentine or other solvent-containing products then obviously I’ll have to for those sessions), mostly working in my room, I decided to start with Gamblin’s solvent-free fluid medium (alkyd+safflower oil), & I may have to re-evaluate as I try more mediums/solvents & get a better feel as to what serves my needs for full paintings, but I will say— so far I really like the stuff. No VOCs (nontoxic & it smells pretty good), it mixes with the paints pretty effortlessly… Compared to heavy bodied acrylics, where you really have to take a few minutes to mash all the lumps out & slowly work it into a thorough, homogenous mixture with any kind of medium, it’s pretty cool to basically just be able to stir it around until the pigment fills out the medium & have it basically become uniform in a few seconds (more like the effort of mixing fluid acrylics into medium). It seems to provide a very nice flow & transparency (depending on how much you add, with even a little bit really going a long way to make the paint workable)… I find the fast drying times of acrylics really convenient (I don’t have a lot of spaces where I can store a painting to dry for days on end with good air flow & sunlight & without any risk of contamination)… It’s really nice that a layer of acrylic is basically dry by the time I’m done with it & I don’t have to worry about that— but I also hate how difficult it is to do really subtle gradients or fades in acrylic… So I LOVE the things you can do with oils that that same property of acrylics makes extremely difficult… I can absolutely see why people like the slow dry times, in terms of being able to lay paints out on a palette & mix & not have to worry about them drying up mid-session (I find myself doing a lot of mixing from tubes as I go in acrylics rather than having everything on a palette at once, & it’s a lot less convenient than either oils or watercolors, though it works). But, moreover, just being able to put some paint down on the surface & then take as long as I want to slooowly feather it out, soften edges (all the way to a fade to the background color, blend colors smoothly… It’s very nice. And the solvent-free alkyd/safflower oil medium seems to work really well for all of these purposes in moderation. I like that it has a reasonable dry time— it feels like a good compromise between the benefits of oils & alkyds from what I’ve read, though I will need more experience before I can really judge to what extent it also suffers from downsides of both, how it compares to either on its own. But for a new oil painting student who is working under the constraints I am (limited space, no real studio, wanting to avoid toxic solvents/fumes, & wanting relatively reasonable dry times) it seems like it was a good choice. It should enable me to at least get familiar enough with the medium to get a better feel for whether it’s something I want to invest more in. And I know I can do underpainting in acrylic, or sketch under-drawings, or other options, but if I end up deciding I need access to the textures that you can only achieve with solvents, or if I want them for underpaintings, I can always just do those layers outdoors & let them evaporate before moving indoors for the layers with the nontoxic, fume-free stuff (I know they sell this medium as a gel too, but I don’t know how it compares to something like Liquin original or Galkyd in terms of fat-over-lean, in terms of texture & consistency… Still, for its benefits, I’m curious to look into it more. The hardest thing to adjust to in oil painting, for me, frankly, has just been the differences in brush management/maintenance compared to acrylics (in watercolors it’s pretty effortless). In acrylics, I’m so used to just having a clean & a dirty cup of water around all the time… If you want better flow, dip your brush in the clean water & dab it off a little. If you want to clean your brush quickly & thoroughly between colors, just give it a quick rinse & scrub in the dirty water, dry it off on paper towel or a disposable sponge or whatever, & repeat until no more color comes out… It IS a bit annoying in acrylic that you have to actually get up & more thoroughly hand-soap-wash your brushes every so many minutes to prevent any acrylic from drying in them, especially if you use a lot of brushes (makes palette knife/scraper/sponge attractive— I’ll tell you that!)… But as far as cleaning a color off between loading with a different color, it’s so easy & quick to just rinse the brush out with water, & it’s very gentle on the brushes. On the other hand, since you don’t want water in your oil painting brushes, from what I gather that doesn’t seem to really be an option. It’s hard to find answers about what to do to clean them off between colors— most of what comes up is about how you can do more thorough deep-cleaning after a painting session… The best I could find was to use some Dawn dish soap, but it was hard to tell for sure whether they intended it for the purpose I was looking for. Can you do that? Just keep a cup with some Dawn & dab the previous color off into that, wipe it dry on a towel, & keep going without any water to rinse the soap remnants or anything? I worry about whether that will be bad for the brushes (I always feel inclined to use water to fully rinse anything I put into them), but I guess if other people use turpentine or mineral spirits or whatever for this purpose, then they can probably survive some soap… If anyone has any other answers/alternatives/feedback about whether you can use the dish soap for that purpose, or if it should only be used once in a while, between sessions, I’d appreciate it. I have seen at least one person say that with oils you can just wipe them off on a towel/paper towel between colors & that’s adequate, but I found that especially with certain colors, that REALLY doesn’t get them out, & I try to be mindful about not leaving traces in my brush & creating mud (I know some people simply have different brushes for different colors/values to minimize that, but I’ve never HAD to do that as long as I was thorough cleaning them out with other mediums, so if there’s a solution that will clean them out pretty thoroughly between colors without a huge to-do, that would be a great help. It still feels so strange not to ever be able to just dip them in water— it’s such a big part of every other medium I’ve ever used (except for alcohol inks). Maybe I just need a cup of safflower oil or something; iirc I think I remember someone mentioning something like that for quick-cleaning brushes… They definitely mentioned dipping the brushes in it to keep them wet between sessions if you’ll be painting again less than a few days apart.

Thank you Tanner. I haven't used oil paints in years. But now I want to give it another go. In the past, I've been using way too much liquin in the paint/liquin ratio. You have inspired me.

One of my favorite emotive seascape painters, Albert Pinkham Ryder was (unfortunately for archival purposes) a master of delamination - he experimented with many methods and mediums to create his works, some of which were…incompatible with time. But I kind of love that… the pieces had/ have a unique life expectancy. I don’t know, there’s a kind of poetic melancholy in this which matches his painting’s imagery. Of course, a nightmare for restoration. Though if museums are willing to reattach straw to an Anselm Keifer, I guess moody old seascapes in wonky oil paint can’t be too challenging, yeah?

Very informative and exactly solves my purpose and doubt that i have with liquin. I also have nightmares with linseed oil and now i can surely say that liquin will be my best mate

You’re great man, keep up the great positive vibes! Very informative!