Cobra Water Mixable Oils

New at Jackson’s – an addition to our Water Mixable Oil Colours Department

Cobra Water Mixable Artist Oils

Paint and clean up in oils without any solvents!
Cobra Water Mixable Oil Colours can be used straight from the tube to paint thickly like traditional oils with visible brush marks but they are soft enough to mix easily for creating secondary colours. The rich pigments are quite concentrated and just a touch of water makes a wash that covers a lot of ground. This wash effect can look like watercolour so adds an interesting dimension to your oil painting. You can create your entire painting without using harmful solvents, by either painting straight from the tube or using a small amount of water.

Clean up is the other great feature of these water mixable oils. Soap and water will clean your brushes, palette, and hands quickly and without any solvents.

Our Cobra video
We made a short video showing Cobra Artist Paints straight from the tube doing some colour mixing and then the difference that a drop of water made for creating a wash. The Cobra Artists Water Mixable Oil Colours we used in the video: Ultramarine Blue, Madder Lake, Phthalo Blue and Permanent Lemon Yellow.
The brushes were an assortment of Jackson’s brushes: Akoya, Black Hog and Procryl.
The surface is a Jackson’s Oil Primed Super Fine Linen Panel.

Cobra, like all water-mixable oil colours, is a genuine oil paint. The paint is made with the same drying oils as regular oil paint and does not contain any water. An unusual property of this oil, however, is that it can be mixed with water, because an emulsifier has been added. The paint can be used in all the usual oil paint techniques. Brushes and palette knives can be cleaned simply using soap and water. Working with water mixable oil colours means you do not have to use any white spirit or other solvent. Cobra oil colours are Artist quality.

Working with Cobra has the following advantages:

• no volatile solvents are necessary such as white spirit and turpentine, so no unpleasant odours, making it pleasant for painters who are sensitive to volatile solvents. Can therefore be used in the studio, living room, outside, everywhere.
• brushes and palette knives can be cleaned easily (soap and water)
• 100% retention of brush stroke/structure
• no colour change in transition from from wet to dry as you can sometimes find with acrylic paints
• all colours have the same degree of gloss
• all colours have the highest degree of lightfastness (+++ = at least 100 years under museum conditions)
• suitable for all oil painting techniques, simple to use (with water or a medium)

Painting Techniques and Tips for Cobra on the Royal Talens site.

Read about the Cobra Water-mixable Oil Painting Mediums in this new blog post.

Testing the Cobra Oil Paints

I painted a few small paintings using Cobra last week. The images in this article are all details from those. For my testing I chose a basic palette of six colours and three neutrals: a warm and cool of the three primaries, two whites (opaque and transparent) and burnt sienna for creating darks. As I will be mixing my own secondary colours I chose single pigment colours so they would not get muddy. For this test I wanted to be able to glaze and layer my colours so I chose transparent pigments and mixed them with Titanium White when I wanted opacity.

The colours I chose for a basic palette:
Permanent Lemon Yellow
Permanent Yellow Medium
Transparent Red Medium
Madder Lake
Ultramarine Blue
Phthalo Blue
Zinc White
Titanium White
Burnt Sienna

I used paint directly from the tube and found it was quite similar to oil paint in how it behaved. It has a buttery thickness that does not need to be thinned unless you need very thin paint, yet holds nice brush marks and can be applied thickly with a palette knife. It mixes easily and blends well. The drying time seems about right for artist grade oil colour, the tests were touch dry in three to five days except for pure titanium white highlights that took over seven days.

Although water is suitable for diluting the colour it can become thick and sticky on the palette almost right away as the water evaporates. If you do not wish to use paint directly for the tube you can use painting mediums designed for water mixable oil, instead of water and this will maintain the correct thickness of the paint. Water Soluble Oil Colour Painting Mediums
Holbein Mediums
Winsor & Newton Mediums

Cobra Water Mixable Artist Oils
Click on the underlined links to go to the paints on the Jackson’s Art Supplies website.
Postage on orders shipped standard to mainland UK addresses is free for orders of £39.