Coming soon – Matisse Dry Mediums

Hi everyone,

I’ve been so slack with the blog recently, but I’ve been doing a very time-consuming PHP course that took over my life. I’ve not been drawing, but I have been painting. I have been working up to a new ‘body of work’ for some time – urban landscape. I’ve also been playing around with these new Matisse Dry Mediums for some months – and they’ll be in the shops in the New Year.

First, I did an abstract, using as many of the mediums as I could. Since then, the students at the Community College have played around with them too, I’ve written the technical notes, and generally I know a lot more about them.

There are eighteen dry mediums – all sorts of exciting powders and grains (how else to describe them) that you mix with the existing mediums. For this painting I used the new-ish Matisse Matt Gel Medium MM30 which is fast becoming my favourite medium.

Here’s some close-ups of the texture. They show some of the sand mediums  (there are five different grades of Lang Lang Sand) and the pumice. As you can see, the texture is amazing and affords great opportunities for broken colour.

For the sky, I used a very small amount of the Microspheres, the dry medium that may well be everyone’s favourite. Microspheres are designed to give texture without weight, so they’re meant for very large canvasses – which this is not. However, we found through  experimentation that Microspheres give a great subtle texture, a bit like a bisque or a faux fresco when used in proportions a bit larger than I used for the sky.

So what other dry mediums are there, not in this painting? Let me think, two sizes of glass beads, crushed garnet, black flake hex (shiny hexagonal black flakes), Mica flakes (great texture and some shimmer too – fabulous on a collograph), two mediums that give great grounds for drawing in charcoal or pastels, Mt Fitton Talc that is designed to be sanded totally smooth, or even to be carved.

That’s certainly not all – I didn’t get to 18, did I? I’m doing another urban landscape, mostly with the finer sands and pumice. This time I’ve done the sky with Wollastonite – that’s one of the dry mediums for drawing, but it works great for just a little texture in the sky. I’ll post that when it’s finished.