how to paint like a Pre-Raphaelite

                                 Our English Coasts:Holman Hunt

If you want to paint like a Pre-Raphaelite there are one or two technical points which will help you achieve a rich, detailed and lustrous surface. One of the most interesting of the group from a technical point of view was William Holman Hunt and I am going to explain the method he used when painting Our English Coasts 1852 (Strayed Sheep) which is in the collection at Tate Britain.

To obtain the kind of surface that Hunt aimed for you could certainly consider the following:

Use an oil rich painting medium.
Use sable rather than bristle brushes for your detailed work.

The advantages of an oil rich painting medium are that you have a buttery medium which dries to a lustrous, enamel like surface. Hunt said that his formula was:to use equal quantities of walnut or poppy oil,copal varnish and turpentine.

These materials may be obtained from good art material shops.

The advantages of sable brushes are that they give much finer, neater lines than you can get with bristle brushes and with broader sables they can give a softer,more even touch.They are very expensive and need careful looking after.

Hunt worked on a white ground, which also helps if the paintwork is thin and the ground can reflect light through it.He said that he would cover the underdrawing on his canvas with a thin layer of spatula applied white oil from which most of the oil had in fact been removed by allowing the paint to stand on a newspaper. Before applying this thin layer he added a drop of varnish.

So he sometimes was painting wet into wet-and with a very light touch.


You can get further detailed information on Hunt and from: Completing the Picture: materials and techniques of twenty-six paintings in the Tate Gallery.This was published by the Tate Gallery , London in 1982. No overall author is listed but the foreword is by Allan Bowness.The actual section on Hunt is by Christine Leback Sitwell.

why paper grain matters to an artist

Have you ever tried to fold a large sheet of paper preparatory to tearing or cutting it into two pieces? If you produced a neat clean fold then you were folding with the paper grain. If the paper cracked and was difficult to fold then you were working against the grain. It is a fact that most paper is made by machine nowadays and the pulp fibres tend to lie in a consistent direction. You can also find grain in artists' quality papers.

The nature of paper grain has long been known to bookbinders who regularly paste papers with a variety of glues. If the papers being glued do not have their fibres running in the same direction then the tensions within the book will tend to warp it.

These tensions can occur in different degrees when making collages or mounting drawings. If the paper is not treated properly it will not be possible to glue it in place without wrinkling and distortion occurring.If you want to make thin pasteboard-which can be very strong, then you should assemble the layers so that the grain of each sheet lies in the same direction. I will say more on this when I write about the making of glue and the practice of gluing paper .

There are many ways of determining paper grain. Which way does the paper fold easiest? That is the direction of the grain. This method works with large sheets of paper. Imagine a rectangular sheet. If it folds easiest from short side to short side then the grain runs parallel to that side and vice versa. If you have only a small square of paper then moisten it and see which way it tends to curl. The direction of curl is parallel to the grain.