Oil Painting for Sale, Chinese Art Painting

Oil Painting is one of the most versatile and adaptable painting mediums in existence today. There are many techniques and effects possible with oil paint. Oil paint can be applied in thin transparent glazes or washes, or the paint can be mixed to a thick buttery consistency and applied using a painting knife. There really appears to be no end to the wonderful ways you can create art with this amazing painting medium. This article will talk about some of the many ways you can use oil paint.

Oil Painting On A Toned Ground

The white of a canvas can sometimes be too bright or have too much contrast which makes starting a Oil Painting a bit difficult. When you cover your support with a uniform toned ground, it makes it much easier to judge the values in your painting. You can use any color you like to tone your ground really, but the more popular approach is to use warm tones of red, yellows and browns, which provide a wonderful richness to the finished work.

Here is an example of how to paint on a toned ground using Burnt Umber and Yellow Ochre. First you create the wash by mixing the Burnt Umber and Yellow Ochre together with a paint thinner (use turpentine, or if you are like me, and are allergic to turpentine, use a water soluble oil paint). Apply the mixture generously to your support and completely cover it with a large bristle brush. Let this mixture stand for a couple of minutes and then wipe off the excess wash with a cloth.

Dry brush

The dry brush technique involves using a small amount of oil paint straight from the tube. It is then brushed thinly onto your support with a bristle brush. This technique works particularly well with a rough surface. The raised parts of your surface pick up the paint, while the dips or valleys in your support do not. This creates a broken color effect where the color of your canvas shows through.

Alla Prima Painting

Alla Prima Oil Painting, also known as “direct painting”, is a technique of oil painting where the work is usually finished in just one sitting. You are probably familiar with the artist Bob Ross, who made this painting method quite popular on his TV Show. I am sure like me, you watched Bob paint in amazement as he completed a beautiful painting in under 30 mintues.

The paint is applied wet onto wet directly onto the canvas usually with no underpainting or sketches. It might be a good idea in the beginning to lay down a sketch with some thinned down Oil Painting. This way you will have a general idea where your colors will be placed. You must be careful using this technique as your painting can become quite muddy if you do not apply the colors correctly on your canvas. It takes practice, so don’t be discouraged if your first, second or even third painting does not come out the way you anticipated. Keep practicing and let your imagination run wild. As Bob used to say, “It’s Your World”.

Working With Painting Knives

If you have never worked with Oil Painting knives, then it is highly recommended that you give them a try. This type of painting method is very different from traditional brush painting and when you lay down your first stroke of paint with a painting knife, you will immediately see why. Painting with a knife can be best described as spreading butter on a piece of bread and you should keep your painting at a butter or cream like consistency when using painting knives. Do not use your palette knives to paint with. They have a different construction and are not made for painting. Painting knives have more flexibility to them and come in a variety of different shapes and sizes. You can manipulate paint in a variety of different ways with a knife just by changing your hand position on the handle. You can hold your hand down low on the handle to smear the paint over your support. Move your hand up to the top of the handle and you can use your finger to gently push the blade into the paint to create small dabs of color. You can also turn your knife blade on its side for scraping away paint or for creating hard lines.

Glazing

If you never produced a Oil Painting using the glazing technique, then you should definitely give this a try as well. Your painting will have a different appearance then if you were to complete a painting using traditional color mixing techniques. Glazing tends to give colors more luminescence. The colors are not mixed together first before applying, rather, they are mixed optically using single transparent layers of color. For instance, if you wanted to create the color green using glazes, you would not mix yellow and blue together on your palette first. Wait until your under painting is dry to begin applying your first layer of color. This technique is tricky and does require practice, but it is not as difficult as some may lead you to believe.You would first apply a thin glaze of blue, wait until it dries, then apply a thin glaze of yellow, which would then create your green. Each layer must be completely dry before applying subsequent layers. Usually, the first step in using the glazing technique is to create a monochromatic (different values of the same color) underpainting of the subject. Using only one color will help you to focus on form and tone first, rather than being too preoccupied with color at this stage.

Are you a total beginner to oil painting? Well either way there are some key facts that you will need to start you off on the right track. To a certain extent you can do whatever you like with acrylics, just keep piling the paint on until you get what you are looking for but with oils it is slightly different.

So, to start with you will need some materials. The art shops have a huge selection of materials to choose from and this can be quite daunting if you don’t really know what you are looking for. In addition to all the numerous paint colours you can chose from there are a wide variety of mediums, brushes, painting surfaces etc.

Paint
Let’s look at paint to start with. There are 2 main types of oil paint in terms of quality – student colours and artist’s colours. Student oils paints are often cheaper than artists as they don’t use the expensive pigments and are produced in larger quantities. The colour strength might be slightly lower than artists’ quality oils but really these are good enough if you are starting out and are often used by professional artists in conjunction with the higher pigment colours of artists’ oils or as base colours before using artists’ oils for the top layer. So to start off with you need only have a basic selection of 10 or 12 tubes of paint. You can often buy the starter boxes which contain a lot of the colours that you might need.

Once you have your paint and your surface or support (canvas) you can start! You will also need a palette of some kind but you can use anything from disposable plates, to a piece of wood, a proper palette from the art shop or a book of disposable palettes (saves on messy palettes hanging around as you can just throw them away!). Plastic palettes are useful as they usually have little sections that you can pour your medium into and use whilst you are oil painting.

What to Paint
So, now you can start. But what do you paint? If you are really just starting out then you may want to get a book that gives you a step-by-step guide as to how to paint a particular scene or painting, then you can learn the methods used to bring the painting to life. Otherwise you may have a favourite photo or a picture from the internet or even an old master that you want to recreate. I really think that trying to copy something that someone has already done is a good way to learn about techniques as it pushes you to try and think about how to do something and in doing so you learn these new techniques that you might not have learnt otherwise.

Layers
Whatever you are trying to paint, you should use a number of layers to build up the painting and not try to complete it all in one go! When I say this I mean the following: For the first layer, use the paint ‘watered’ down with thinners. oil paintingThis is starting the painting using the ‘fat over lean’ method. In basic terms when you apply paint, the most oily layer (fat) should be on top of the layer with least oil (lean i.e. containing thinners) underneath. If you don’t use this method then your painting might subsequent have cracks in it where the different layers of paint dry at different speeds.

There are many different schools of thought as oil painting to how to actually paint and what colours to use and this article is not going to be encompassing enough to go through those. Basically on the first layer apply it with thinners in a loose manner. The main aim is to cover all of the canvas with some paint to provide a foundation. As you apply more and more layers – the number of layers is up to you – the paint should have more oil in it as you go on. So for example in the next layer you could use half linseed oil and half thinners as a medium and then the layer after linseed oil with no thinners.

Cleaning Brushes
The common school of thought is to clean brushes with turps or a specific brush cleaner. However, I find it better (I think on the environment as well as the smell and keeping the brushes for longer) to use soap and warm water. Soap can be just a simple soap or you can use washing up liquid. Make the brush wet then build up a lather with the soap. Rinse out the paint with warm water and repeat until the brush is clean.oil painting

Oil paints do take a reasonable time to dry – particularly if you compare them to acrylics. oil painting,Paint with more thinners in will dry quicker however and you can also buy mediums that will make the paint dry quicker (e.g. liquin). The first layer with thinners should dry reasonably quickly, particularly if you are using earthy colours. It is up to you if you wait for the layers to dry, quite often this depends on the type of painting you are doing, or if you add subsequent layers on top of the wet paint. If you do this then just be careful to work in definite strokes and to clean your brush often so that the paint does not ‘muddy’ and mix layers together more than you would like.

Summary
So in summary, for the complete beginner in oils I would say this. Get yourself a box of student oil paints, some thinners, some linseed oil, a palette, 2 or 3 brushes in different sizes, and a canvas. Choose a subject or get a book that gives you step by step instructions. Paint in layers ‘fat over lean’.oil painting, Keep practising!