Are you tired of looking at a screen full of pixels? Pining for something different, thinking back to the hallowed days of yore, when artists spent countless hours grinding pigments and inhaling toxic fumes in a vain attempt to create a lasting piece of art? Well, you came to the right place.
Today, I’m going to give you a brief introduction to the wonderful world of oil painting. For the last 500 years, oils have held up as the premier medium for artistic expression. Oils arguably give artists the ability to create art in the widest array of styles and techniques possible. The advantages of oils include the ability to paint wet on wet, ease of blending, as well as providing a wide variety of transparent and opaque colors. Disadvantages include expensive paints, prolonged drying time, smell from solvents, and overall messiness. With a little bit of common sense and know-how, these problems can easily be avoided or overcome.
Getting Equipped
Getting started in oil painting doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg. For under $90, you can buy everything necessary to create several fine paintings:
| Materials | Quanity | Cost |
| Odorless Turpenoid | 1 quart | $10-12 |
| Oil paint (duh!?) | 4 tubes (37 ml) | $25-30 |
| Brushes | 3 brushes | $16-19 |
| Pre-gessoed Canvas or board | 1 Canvas pad (16×20″) | $20 |
| Glass Pallette | 1 piece | $5 |
Other items include: Used rags, jars for turp/medium, transfer paper, and an easel/table to paint on.
Oil Paint
Obviously, the first thing you should consider is the paint itself. You’ll want to buy only a few primary colors to start and then build on that as you advance in your skills. You really only need 4 tubes of paint to create all the colors of the rainbow: red, yellow, blue, and white. My core palette consists of Cadmium Yellow Medium, Napthol Red, Titanium White, and Phthalo Blue. I also use burnt umber for underpainting and to create darker blacks. Occasionally, I’ll use a color like cadmium lemon or alizarin crimson if I need the added punch. Color choice is very personal: find colors that work best for you and stick with them. Brands are likewise subject to individual taste. Juicy, fluid paint is what I like, so I work with mostly M. Graham or Gamblin colors. Since the colors are nice and flowing, I don’t need to rely on mediums to get the paint into a workable state, which brings us to…
Solvents and Mediums
Some people get confused by the difference between solvents and mediums. Solvents include turpentine, paint thinner, and oil of spike and are used to clean brushes and thin the consistency of paint. Solvents are especially useful in the underpainting stage, allowing you to lay down thin washes, which, due to the low oil content will dry in a matter of hours. Mediums, such as liquin and stand oil, are added to paint to make the paint film fatter, decrease or increase drying times and opacity, and alter the consistency of the paint. A general rule of thumb is that adding more than 20% of a medium to your paint should be avoided. I paint mostly wet on wet using no mediums, but when I do paint in layers, I save mediums for the final layer to avoid breaking the rule of “fat over lean” (see below).
