Читать книгу Finishing Techniques for Wood Crafters - Lora S. Irish - Страница 9

The woods that we paint tend to be very porous—they absorb water, oils, and colors quickly. Basswood, for example, which is the most common wood for character carving and fish decoys, is extremely absorbent and will need pre-treatment before any painting in order to create the smoothest paint finish possible. Here are some examples of pre-treatments that can be used on wood projects before actually painting. Most of the projects in this book use one of the following pre-treatments.

Sanding Sealer

Sanding sealer is a brush-on pre-finish that hardens the top surface of the wood, making the loose wood fibers stiff enough to sand away. Usually one to two light coats are applied to the raw wood and allowed to dry thoroughly. The sealer is then sanded using fine 220- to 320-grit sandpaper. Basswood, poplar, and butternut are all common carving woods that have a soft, finely grained surface that can be hard to sand to a smooth, glass-like finish. Sanding sealer soaks into the upper surface of these woods, hardening the wood fibers and making them easier to remove. Use a sanding sealer coat before painting if you are having problems teasing out those hard-to-reach loose wood splinters. The smoother your wood surface is, the smoother your color application will be.

This fish was pre-treated with a reworkable fixative spray sealer.

Reworkable Fixative Spray Sealer

Many art media techniques need a fixative to seal one layer of work before applying additional layers of color. A reworkable fixative spray sealer does just that. It seals and protects the color work you have already done on the project, yet allows new color to be applied to its lightly textured surface. Reworkable sealers can also be used to pretreat a raw wood surface, acting similar to sanding sealer by hardening and strengthening the upper surface of the wood. By applying one light coat of reworkable spray sealer to raw wood, you can control how much color soaks into the wood with the first application of thinned and wash coat paints.

Water Wash

For very soft woods, such as basswood or poplar, just a few light coats of water can pre-moisten a carving enough to allow acrylic or craft paints to flow smoothly onto the surface of the carving.

Acrylic Wash

Acrylic paints can be thinned with water, in at least a one-to-one ratio, to create an acrylic wash pre-treatment. Such washes allow you to blend and mix several colors or tones on the wood to create a base coat for a painting.

This dragon was painted starting with a multicolored acrylic wash.

Oil and Turpentine Coating

Mixing boiled linseed oil with turpentine at a one-to-one ratio makes a wonderful pre-treatment that allows the wood grain to show through the paint. This oil mix is often a pre-treatment base for dry brushing both acrylics and oil paints.

Spray or Brush-On Sealer

There is a wide variety of spray and brush-on finishes that can be used to seal wood before applying color. Matte and semi-matte sealers work best because they have a small amount of texture that captures and holds the layers of paint, as opposed to super-smooth gloss sealers. Spray and brush-on sealers are most often used as the finishing coat, meant to be the last layer of work in your color application, as they completely seal the wood surface and repel water, oil, and new layers of paint from penetrating into the wood. However, when you want to slowly build up layers of transparent colors, such as when oil rouging for skin tones (see page), one light coating of a spray or brush-on sealer sets the color layer below it and provides a slick, smooth surface for the new layer of coloring.