The Chipmunk

As I was making up small test batches of homemade casein paint, I realized that I had a lot of earth toned pigments. What to paint that's brown? How about a cute little chipmunk? As I was painting the fur, I was reminded of the many excellent tutorials on YouTube by wildlife artist, Jason Morgan. Yet while there were similarities in technique, there certainly were differences, since Jason often paints tigers. 
This particular painting, unlike the other casein paintings I have done, is in fact an emulsion. It is an oil and water hybrid, with the easy handling and quick drying characteristics of a water-based paint. 

Fireweed

My dad was telling me about his recent reminiscences of time spent in northern BC, and of how he remembered the profusion of wildflowers that grow there. I thought to myself how a painting of those flowers would make a nice little Father's Day gift. So I duly got busy and painted this incredible field of fireweed. But just as I was giving him the little 5 x 8 piece, a realization hit me that it wasn't fireweed, that he was missing, but rather Indian paint brush. I had painted the wrong flower! We had a good laugh over that one. Oh well. His birthday is next month.
Here I am continuing my adventures with casein paint. I've actually taken things to the next level by making my own. Milk and acid and alkali and water and pigment and you have casein paint. Not that hard to do. Really. This paint is so versatile.

Naniamo

Just when I was considering what I would paint next, I got an email from Carole, an artist friend with a change of address notice. They were downsizing to an apartment with a view of the water in Naniamo, BC. I looked up the area, and found this image, near to where they will be living. This is a small painting, about 7 inches square, done on paper in that exciting 6,000 year old 'new' paint medium, casein.
About a week earlier, I got inspired to find out all that I could about the media. If you look online, you will find that there is not too much out there, but what there is is fascinating. I was getting hooked.

Ocean Park

After more than half my life inland and far away, I've returned to the Pacific coast. Home is where you're from, and now I'm home. Ocean Park is on the western tip of the Semiahmoo peninsula, a quiet gem near White Rock, between the US border and Vancouver. Views like this are common, and are shared with bald eagles. 
Yet another water based media, this was painted opaquely as well as transparently using casein.  Pronounced kay-seen, it is a pigmented binder, or glue, made from a protein found in milk. Binder plus pigment equals paint. Ten years ago, I did a painting of the infamous kitten, George Michael, looking out our window. As a generally overlooked paint, it has great potential.

George Michael

Our oldest kids shared an apartment and together got a kitten, which they named George Michael. He came to stay with us over the Christmas holidiays, and somehow it sort of felt like we were babysitting a grandchild. A foretaste, perhaps. Here was great subject matter for a painting, but how to get him to stay still long enough for a photo? Finally I managed to catch him staring intently at something out the window. This one would be done in casein, using my newly acquired techinques.

Casein is a very obedient paint, unlike watercolor. It goes where you put it, but nothing more. Some people like that. But I found that I was missing the 'give and take' of watercolor. There is a kind of partnership with watercolor. You do this, and it will do that. You start the process, and it will complete it while you are out of the room. Its a bit like giving a horse the reigns and it will find its way home. I had the hardest time getting the paint to blend the way I wanted along the window sill in this painting. The watercolor would have known what to do. But this stuff! I had to tell it everything.

I attempted two more casein paintings, but not being happy with how they were going, abandoned them both. During this time I also bought a nice set of water soluable oil paints. Seven months later they are still in their box. Maybe someday, but I could hear my watercolors calling me back.

Casein

I don't know how it happened, but I started to get interested in an opaque medium called casein. Paint is applied like oil or acrylic and has similar characteristics. It is thinned with water but doesn't harden on the pallete the way acrylic does, so it sounded ideal. There is not much information on this fairly obscure medium, so I started reading books on oil painting technique. The self-taught approach kicked into research mode as I read everything I could from the local libraries. I was peeking over the fence so to speak into the land of an entirely different way to paint. It was a strange country where a foreign language was spoken. Impasto? Scumbling? Gesso?

After the research, it was time to try it. Theory and practice. Both are good. As I had done in the past, I turned to the work of an artist I admired, in this case acclaimed oil painter Caroline Jasper. Although I was working in casein, the method was the same, and I copied her piece entitled "Expectations". She (and therefore I) started this painting by painting everything red. What a strange thing it was to dab thick white paint over a dark surface. But fun too. See that little mistake? Well now you see it, now you don't...ha ha ha.

This wasn't Kansas anymore.