Oil Paints and Painting

Artists’ oil colours are made by adding dry powder pigments with selected refined linseed oil until it reaches a stiff paste texture and grinding it under harsh friction in steel roller mills. The perfection of the colour is fundamental. The usual standard is a smooth, buttery paste, and not stringy or long or tacky. When a more flowing or mobile quality is desired by the artist, a liquid painting medium such as pure gum turpentine must be stirred in with the concoction. If the artist needs to speed up drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, can be often used.

Top-class brushes are made in two kinds: red sable (from numerous members of the weasel species) and whitened hog bristles. They both can be purchased in numbered sizes for each of four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat shape but shorter and not as supple), and oval (flat shape but bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are often utilised for a smoother, detailed type of painting. The painting knife, a thinly tempered, skinny version of the art palette knife, is a useful method for using oil colours in a robust way.

The generic support for an oil painting is a canvas manufactured from pure European linen of stable close weave. A canvas is cut to the desired size and stretched over a frame, commonly wooden, to which it is secured with tacks or, during the 20th century, by staples. In order to lessen the absorbency of the canvas fabric itself and to achieve a consistent surface, a primer or ground could be applied and is given time to dry before painting begins. The most generally found primers have been gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If density and a smooth consistency are preferred to springiness and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, can be utilised. Many other supports, such as paper and certain textiles and metals, have been tried out.

A coat of paint varnish is often set on to a completed oil painting to protect it from atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, or an harmful accumulation of dirt. This picture varnish can be taken off without damaging the painting by experts using isopropyl alcohol and other household solvents. The picture varnish also brings the surface to a consistent lustre and brings the tonal depth and colour intensity essentially to the look originally formed by the artist in wet paint. Some painters, in particular those who don’t favour deep, intense colouring, and keep a mat, or lustreless, finish in their paintings.

Many oil paintings dating before the 19th century were created in layers. The first would be a blank, uniform field of thinned paint known as a ground. The ground graduated the glare of the primer and formed a gentle base on which to start painting. The shapes and objects in the painting would be roughly blocked in from shades of white, and gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The ultimate masses of monochromatic colours were termed the underpainting. Forms would be further defined by using either paint or scumbles, which are non-uniform, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that can create a variety of effects. In the final stage, transparent layers of pure colour known as a glaze then could be used to cast luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the figures, and highlights could be effected with thick, textured patches of paint known as impastos.

Oil as a medium of painting is recorded as early as the 11th century. The technique of easel painting with oil colours, however, resulted directly from 15th-century tempera-painting styles. Simple improvements in the refining of linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents after 1400 coincided with a need for a medium other than pure egg-yolk tempera, in meeting the changing requirements of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). Originally, oil paints and varnishes would be utilised to glaze tempera panels that were painted from a traditional linear draftsmanship. The technically brilliant, jewel-like portraits from the 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, for example, were done with this technique.

In the 16th century, oil colour became established as the basic painting material in Venice. By the 17th century, Venetian artists had grown proficient in the use of the fundamental aspects of oil painting, especially in their use of many layers of glazing. Linen canvas, after a long period of growth, replaced wood panels as the common support.

One of the 17th-century masters of the oil technique was Velázquez, a Spanish artist in the Venetian tradition, whose supremely economical but certain brushstrokes have often been copied, notably in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens challenged tradition in the manner in which he loaded his light colours opaquely, to juxtapose the thin, transparent darks and shadows. Another notable 17th-century master of oil painting was the Dutch painter Rembrandt. In his artworks, a single brushstroke can effectively depict form; cumulative strokes created great textural depth, combining the rough and the smooth, the thick and the thin. A technique of loaded whites and transparent darks is fully enhanced by glaze, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.

Other basic influences on easel painting techniques are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight styles. A great many admired works (e.g., such as from Johannes Vermeer) were completed with smooth graduated blends of tones to achieve subtly modeled forms and delicate colour variations.

The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be realized with traditional genres and/or techniques, however. Many abstract painters - as well as some modern traditional painters - have shown a desire for a wholly different plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be had with oil paint and its conventional additives. Some require a larger range of thick or thin applications and a faster rate of drying. Some artists have mixed coarsely grained substances with the colours to create new textures, some of them have applied oil paints in heavier thickness than usual, and many have started using acrylic paints, because they are more versatile and dry faster.

Interested in oil painting? For art supplies Brisbane, including canvas art supplies and artists supplies, visit or call the Discount Art Warehouse.