Using mediums and additives in Easel by Zaweba

Paint straight from the tube is only half the story. Painters have always changed its behaviour with mediums: an oil to make it richer, a gel to slow its drying, a drop of something to help a wash spread. Easel by Zaweba includes the main mediums for oil, acrylic and watercolour, so you can do the same.

Oil mediums and the fat over lean rule

For oil painting, Easel offers linseed oil, glazing medium and solvent. Linseed oil makes paint richer, or fatter. Solvent thins it, making it leaner. Glazing medium is for thin, transparent layers that change the colour below.

These matter because of a rule every oil painter learns early: fat over lean. Each layer should be at least as oily as the one beneath it. In Easel, lean paint dried over fat paint cracks, just as it can on a real canvas.

So start lean. Block in with paint thinned by solvent, then add more oil in later layers. Keep glazes, which are oily, for the end. If you see cracking where you didn't expect it, look at the order of your layers.

Acrylic mediums

Acrylic has its own set: retarder, flow improver, gloss medium and matt medium.

Acrylic dries fast. In the real world retarder slows that down, giving more time to blend. Flow improver is used to help paint level out and move more freely, which suits smooth areas and thin washes. Gloss and matt medium change the sheen of the finished surface.

A sensible approach is to decide on the finish early. If you want a glossy look throughout, use gloss medium as you go. If you want a flat, even surface, use matt.

Watercolour additives

Gum arabic, ox gall and granulation medium are the watercolourist's helpers.

Gum arabic is the binder in watercolour paint itself, and adding more is a traditional way to make colour richer and more transparent. Ox gall is a wetting agent that helps a wash spread more evenly across the paper. Granulation medium encourages the speckled texture that some pigments make naturally as they settle into the paper's grain.

Easel's watercolour already granulates on rough paper. Granulation medium is the tool for leaning further into that look, which works beautifully for stone, sand, old walls and weathered textures.

How mediums fit the rest of the studio

Mediums work alongside the paint settings you already have. Each wet paint has Water and Thickness settings, and the drying speed slider changes how quickly everything dries. Mediums add a further layer of control on top.

They also interact with the pigment library, which lists properties such as transparency, staining and granulation. A naturally granulating pigment plus granulation medium on rough paper gives the strongest effect. A transparent pigment plus glazing medium gives the clearest glazes.

Getting the balance right

A little goes a long way. Overusing any medium tends to make paint behave oddly, and the same is true here. Decide what problem you are solving first: too fast, too stiff, too dull, too flat. Then reach for the one medium that fixes it.

Remember fat over lean whenever you work in oil. It is the one rule that can spoil a whole painting, and it is easy to keep once it becomes a habit. With that in mind, mediums make Easel by Zaweba feel even closer to a real studio bench.