Tundraco's Daily Living Guide to Home & Garden The Basics of Painting with Oils

Many new artists are skittish about working with oils. They should not be,

• Oils are easy to work with and you need very little equipment to begin painting.
• Oils are very slow drying, taking 48 hours to a week to dry depending upon the thickness of the paint. This allows the artist time to go back and make changes, when necessary.

• Paint: All you need is a basic color palette of red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and violet. You can than mix these colors to achieve other colors and shades.
• Thinning Agent: Most oil paints needed to be thinned before being used. Turpentine works well. Make sure you use artist's turpentine and not household turpentine. Household turpentine contains impurities that can damage the paint.
• Canvas to paint on. Both cotton and linen canvases are suitable for oil paintings. You will need to stretch your canvas over a wooden frame before you begin painting. Prestretched canvases are also available.
• Brushes: Long handled, handmade hog bristle brushes are recommended for oil painting. These brushes come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Always use natural brushes with oils. Synthetic brushes to not hold up well with oils.
• Cleaning Solvent and rags with which to clean your brushes. Mineral spirits and turpentine are the most common solvents used.
• Studio Palette, this is a wood, acrylic, glass, porcelain, or plastic board on which you mix your paints.
• Knives: A palette knife is used to mix paint and to scrape it off of a palette. A painting knife is used to apply paint to the canvas.

There are three main ingredients that make up an oil paint – the pigment, oil, and something to make the paint dry.

• Oil paints come in artist (professional) and student grades.
• Student grade paints are less expensive because they contain less and lower quality pigments than do artist grade paints.

Many oil painters like to put a coat of varnish over their work in order to protect it from dust and damage. You should wait at least six months before varnishing a painting. This delay is necessary to ensure that the paint is thoroughly dry and hard.

When painting with oils, there is one basic principle to always keep in mind – fat over thin. Fat over thin simple means that you should never paint over a layer of paint with a high oil content with a paint that has less oil.

• If you do, the top layer will dry before the bottom layer does. This will result in the top layer of paint cracking or chipping.
• You can increase the fat (oil) content of the paint by adding linseed oil.

Tole work is a variation of oil painting. Tole painters use oil paints, and oil painting skills, to decorate furniture, enamel ware, metal, pottery, and other household items.