Welcome to Painting

Tips and Tricks of Oil Painting

In painting, you have a choice of paints to use. You can choose watercolors and their soft hues, or acrylic paints for their ease of use. But for serious art, most painters would choose oil paints for their vivid range of colors and their lasting durability.

When pigments are ground as well as mixed in the medium of oil and in the case of modern Europe, in linseed oil, it is called oil painting. These paints have been made using the same techniques and materials for hundred of years.

There are many different oils used including poppyseed oil, walnut oil as well as safflower oil that have properties that include less yellowing as well as differences in drying times. These oils also differ in the sheen of the paint which is dependent on the oil used and it is not unusual for a painter to use different oils on the same painting.

Proper Application of Oil Paint

In oil paint application, the basic rule is to have fat over lean which means that each subsequent layer of paint applied should be correspondingly oilier than the previous one as this makes it easier to dry the paint properly.

In the traditional mold of painting techniques, the artist may often start off with paint that is mixed with turpentine. Also, with additional layers of paint, the paint becomes oilier and this makes it hard for the painting to crack or peel.

Among the many painting mediums that may be used for oil painting are cold wax, resins as well as varnishes and these mediums help the painter in adjusting the translucency of the paint.

It also aids in adjusting the paint's sheen as well as the density of the paint's body and also the ability of the paint in holding or concealing the visibility of the brush stroke. This allows the beholder to view the original oil painting and sense the choices that the painter made while applying the paint.

The Beginning of Oil Painting

The first use of oil painting may have been in the Middle High Ages when surfaces such as shields were made more durable by applying oil painting to them. However, Renaissance sources attribute the northern European painters of the fifteenth century as inventors of the oil painting, especially on wood panels and a name most often mentioned in this regard is that of Jan van Eyck.

Oil painting processes vary from artist to artist though certain steps are common for all and these include preparing the surface, applying a ground to isolate the canvas and also sketching the outline of the subject before applying the pigment to the surface.

Through tradition, the artist has always mixed his or her own paints for all of his or her projects. Later, with the availability of oil paints in tubes, all this has changed and they may now mix colors quickly without the need of grinding their own pigments. Also, oil painting involves the use of brushes to apply the paint and the brushes may be made of many different fibers in order to get the desired effect.

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