[Lead White]
Name: Carl Garris
Date and Time:
2017.[December].[11]
Location: Making and Knowing Lab
Subject: Painting Azur in Lead WhiteThe author practitioner writes that one can test the quality of azur desmail by mixing it with lead white on a palette--good quality stuff goes turquoise and bad quality stuff goes grey lavender. We therefore mixed small amounts of Kremer azurite, smalt, verditer, and lapis lazuli into commercial lead white oil paint. To do this experiment, we had to follow the proper safety procedures for non-powdered lead, using full PPE with safety coat, glasses, and gloves. All waste went into the hazardous oil stream (some to liquid, some to solid).
We used around a teaspoon of lead white, which proved too much as the lead white simply devours blue pigments added to it. We had to keep adding blue pigment until, after adding several teaspoons, we caused a color change in each. All except verditer went a purplish grey. Verditer went a bluish grey. From these results, we can possibly see that verditer is "higher quality" stuff--but that conclusion makes almost no sense considering the prestige of azurite over verditer (the synthetic stuff). Due to the methodological issues involved in using too much lead white and also in assuming that differences in quality reflected different pigments rather than different grades of the same pigment, we would need to repeat this experiment with better parameters in order to achieve a meaningful result.
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