Knowledge List of Oil Painting

The Industrial Era: 1800-1900’s Canvas Oil Painting

from:oilpaintingtechniquesonline

Spain in the 1800s played an important part in the social, political, economic and cultural history of the world. The material and spiritual changes introduced into Spanish life were huge. You might say that the start of artistic development of many Spanish regions was initiated, especially pertaining to painting, in the 19th century where it reached an even higher level.
During this time well known artists of importance combined their work with artists who were not known, creating works of art that displayed illustrations of documentaries and of monumental occasions.
Many of the painting of this time reflect the Spanish landscapes that were filled with the development of industry. Artist’s interpretation sometimes portrayed the lifestyle of the modest folk or the pastoral picture of the surrounding civilizations. Most of the artists told a story of the time and happenings of the world around them.
In the industrial age, Spanish romanticism contributed its own semantic version, starting with the mythological and moving on to a flavor region, then from the technical to the religious. The mark that the Spanish romanticism left during the industrial age became a future reference point for many generations of painters.
At the same time, Spanish romanticism opened doors for painting in the form of realism as a documentary through direct observation of life, the paintings often times captured local manners and customs of the local people, many times creating burning questions of society and even contributing to and questioning a certain ideology that might be connected to the values of regional sentiments.
You will find very few Spanish paintings that show representations of machines alone in the 1800-1900’s, you are more likely to see machines that are used as part of the scenery where people are working or where it has been involved in an accident.
You will find that artists of the era where more likely to experiment color and light, following the traditions of the European impressionists.
The era of the 1800-1900’s was known as the industrial age which is shown in painting of artists by adding powerful machines into the landscaping. You will find pictures of steam engines and factories set in backgrounds of landscape. Factories of majestic industrial constructions with billowing smoke coming from the use of coal are often favorite scenes of the era. Iron bridges and railways, the first water mains and steam ships. The realist and romantic artists undertook painting maritime and fluvial ports, small businesses and factories, pickling factories and interiors of bodegas, as well as inventions of technology such as the dirigible or submarine, changing the way that artist had painted. Not to mention the painting that were filled with industrial catastrophes, the working conditions of women and children, riots, work-related accidents, and anything of realism.
Art in the industrial area had become a way reporting by the capturing true life incidents a putting them on canvas. Not only was it a way of recording history, but a way of capturing what was going on at that time.

The Worlds Artist Oil Painting Reproduction, Portraiture, Old Masters to Abstract

By: The World's Artist / Al Mansour
from:buyoilpainting

Handling your oil paintings: Unframed oil painting reproductions or original oil painting should be handled as little as possible and when oil painting reproductions or oil paintings must be handled, ensure that your hands are washedbeforehand and are free of grease or lotions.
Never lift your unframed oil painting reproduction (not on a stretcher frame) with bare fingers by the edges or touch the surface. Wear gloves, use tissue paper, or lift from beneath using cardboard to support and hold the cardboard, not the oil painting. Framing your oil paintings: Framing should be done to the highest quality affordable, using acid free materials that will not interact with the hand painted oil painting to enable it to be displayed for optimum visual effect.
Quality framing is not expensive and well worth it. Hanging your oil paintings: Your oil painting reproduction or original oil painting should be hung using high quality multi strand, braided picture wire, attached to the frame (or stretcher frame) via swivel jointed eyes and suspended from heavy duty wall hooks.
Heavy framed fine art should always be hung from two hooks, each capable of supporting double the weight of the frame for safety reasons. Lighting: Avoid direct sunlight. Fading due to UV rays is cumulative and irreversible. If possible, display in a room with blinds or curtains.
Climate: Avoid locating oil painting reproductions, portraits in oil or original oil paintings in an area of sudden temperature changes from hot to cold.
The room temperature and relative humidity should remain reasonably constant, as large temperature changes cause expansion and contraction of both the oil painting and frame, which can lead to structural damage in hand painted canvas oil paintings and cause a small rippling effect. Temperature should be between 50F/10c to 77F/25c and between 40% to 60% relative humidity. Do not locate directly in the field of any forced ventilation.
If you are located in a humid or coastal area, consider the use of a de-humidifier. Cleaning oil paintings copies: Oil paintings should be gently dusted, if anything sticks to the paintings, have it professionally cleaned. Accidents: If the oil painting reproduction or portrait painting gets wet, seek repair advice from a professional immediately. It is important to dry the 100% hand painted canvas oil painting right away before mould starts. Your home insurance should cover such accidents. Varnishing oil paintings: All 100% hand painted canvas oil paintings and portraiture are provided unvarnished by default. Varnishing is not essential.
It can undertaken by an experienced buyer or a restorer: in order to be protect the fine art for display, to give it a desired matt, semi-gloss, or gloss surface finish or to simply enhance the surface luster after a period of time. Varnishing also gives a uniform surface appearance to your paintings, as different oil paints and colors can harden with a slightly different surface 'sheen', especially at areas of overlapping between sessions. Do not varnish for at least 6 months to allow sufficient hardening of the oil paint.

Introduction to Oil Painting Techniques

By: Ralph Serpe
from:buyoilpainting

Oil paint is an amazing versatile medium. It can be applied in a thick buttery fashion or thinned down to a watery consistency. This versatility opens the door to a number of different painting techniques.
My personal preference is to begin my oil paintings by first sketching out the composition using acrylic paint or with water-soluble oil paints. The popular approach to oil painting is to thin the paint with turpentine to apply your initial layers. Turpentine is quite toxic and I prefer not to work with it. Acrylic or water-soluble oil paints can be thinned down with plain old water and are more pleasant to work with in my opinion.
You can also begin your oil painting by first drawing out your composition. There are a few drawing mediums that work quite nicely with oil paints. My two favorites are vine charcoal and water-soluble pencils.
I prefer vine charcoal because it doesn't smudge like other charcoals and it can be erased easier. Water-soluble pencils are wonderful because they can be applied like ordinary pencils and can be spread around like paint with a damp brush. If you are the impatient type, you may want to try your hand at the Alla Prima oil painting technique.
The Alla Prima method is when you complete the painting in one sitting rather than paint in layers and wait for the paint to dry. Although I usually prefer to work out my paintings in layers, I occasionally enjoy this exciting and spontaneous approach to oil painting.
If you are the careful, patient type of painter, you may be interested in working with the glazing technique. Glazing has lost popularity these days, partly because of the time needed to complete such a painting and it's difficulty, but the results are something truly unique to any other type of oil painting technique. The composition is first painted with an opaque monochrome underpainting, usually in shades of gray. After this initial underpainting is thoroughly dry, thin layers of transparent oil glazes are applied. Colors are not mixed directly but added in separate layers to get the desired color.
If you are the adventurous type, put the brushes aside and try a set of painting or palette knives. You can achieve some very interesting results with knives that aren't possible with brushes. The oil paint can be spread on thickly and scraped off with ease. What I enjoy most about using knives is the tendency to not focus on the small details. I am forced to paint in a more relaxed fashion that creates an impressionist style painting. Get yourself a set of painting knives and try to complete an entire painting with just the knives. It's challenging at first if you are used to brushes, but it's an enjoyable exercise.
Perhaps you would like your painting to have more body and texture. You could try the impasto painting technique and apply your paint in thick heavy strokes, leaving evidence of all those wonderfully artistic brush strokes. Take a look at a Van Gogh painting and you will see this technique in action.
It's really no wonder why oil painting is such a popular choice for painters. There is so much to discover in oil painting. You will never get bored trying out all the wonderful tools, mediums and techniques.

The Outside Shore
Oil Paint

From: outsideshore

What Is Oil Paint?
Oil paint, it would seem, needs little in the way of introduction, as it is the painting medium most people are most familiar with. The majority of paintings one sees in most galleries and museums are done with oil paint. Still, it never hurts to know a little more about the medium.
Oil paint consists of pigment suspended in a vegetable-based oil. The oils used are drying oils, which is to say that left exposed to air for a length of time, they eventually cure through an oxidation process and become hard and permanently affixed to the painting surface. Linseed oil is the most common, but safflower, poppy, and walnut oils are used as well. The different oils have different properties in terms of how long the curing process takes, how hard the oil film becomes, how resistant to cracking or yellowing it becomes, and so forth.
Once cured, a painting needs relatively little in the way of protection, although varnish is common to protect against atmospheric pollutants. Still, over time, the painting may be susceptible to cracking and/or yellowing. These risks can be lessened if proper care is taken when creating the painting in the first place, as certain techniques are more prone to eventual problems than others. See the section on Making Marks below.
Buying Oil Paint
There are a few questions you need to answer before buying oil paints.
Student Versus Artist Quality
This is the very first question a newcomer to oil painting has to answer for himself. The student grades are, as you might expect, less expensive, and of correspondingly lower quality. There is considerable debate among art educators as to whether the trade-off is worthwhile. I personally do not have strong feelings on the matter, so I can try to be reasonably objective here.
First, you might be wondering what "lower quality" actually means in practice. This can vary by manufacturer. In some cases, fillers may be used that compromise the permanence of the resulting paintings. That may or may not concern you at all when you are first starting out. It is also usually the case that less pigment is used per tube than in artist quality paint. As far as I can tell, if all your paints are student grade, this should not matter much, but it would seem true that it would take a lot of student quality yellow to make a green when mixed with an artist quality blue, for example.
Perhaps the most problematic issue with student grade paints is the tendency to use less expensive substitute pigments in some colors. These are generally labeled "hues". For example, a paint labeled "Cadmium Red Hue" is more or less the same color as cadmium red but contains a less expensive substitute for the quite expensive cadmium red pigment. Many people consider this use of "hues" to be reason enough to avoid student grade paints. I disagree. Just because a pigment is less expensive does not mean it is inferior. I happen to prefer several of the cheaper pigments often used as substitutes for cadmium red over cadmium red itself. As long as you are aware you are not getting cadmium red, and therefore the paint will not behave in all respects like cadmium red, you might well be perfectly happy with what you are getting instead.
There may well be other more subjective issues with some student grade brands. In particular the "feel" of the paint might be different from artist quality paints, in terms of thick or oily or buttery or creamy the paint feels. On the other hand, each artist quality brand feels different as well, so in the end, it comes down to personal preference in most cases.
Now, conversely, I should point out arguments in favor or using artist quality paint. To start with, the price difference is not that extreme, if you compare paints made from similar pigments and consider how much you will actually use. A tube of student quality ultramarine blue might sell for $4 and one of artist quality for $6, and either tube will most likely last you several months, depending on how much you paint. Sure, you will need more than one tube of paint, but still, the total difference in paint costs over the course of a year might well be less than the cost of dinner for two at a chain restaurant.
There is also the danger the student grade paint you choose will be so compromised in quality that you get frustrated with it and give up on painting. This would seem to be most likely if the pigment strength was very low or texture way too oily or too stiff, which can indeed making mixing and applying paint more difficult than it need be.
So you may well decide that the difference in price is more than worthwhile. That will have to be up to you.
Water Miscible Oils
Oil paints are traditionally made from linseed oil, which, like most oils, is not water soluble. This means that you typically need something like turpentine, mineral spirits, or a citrus-based solvent for cleanup and for thinning paint. Recently, paints made from chemically modified oils have come on the market, and these allow cleanup with just soap and water. Several manufacturers offer these types of paints. Some say they do not handle the same as ordinary oils, but given the convenience as well as ecological advantages of not needing to deal with solvents, these paints are proving quite popular, especially with people new to the medium.
Alkyds
Another type of chemically modified oil paint are the alkyds. These are like traditional oil paints in all respects except one: they cure much more quickly. Whereas a typical oil painting might take a week or more before it is dry enough to handle easily without risking damage to the surface, an alkyd painting reaches that point in around one day.
Oil Paint Brands
Once you've settled the student versus artist grade issue, then you can pick specific brands. I do not have enough experience with different brands to really offer much advice. I can recommend The Oil Painting Book, by Bill Creevy, for information on different brands, although it is bound to be somewhat out of date, as smaller companies come and go and even larger ones changes their formulations. But here are some of the more popular brands and what I know about them:
Winsor & Newton
This is one of the most popular oil paint brands, found in most art stores. Their artist quality paints are relatively inexpensive, and their student grade paints (Winton) are even more so.
Grumbacher
This is another of the most popular brands, cheaper than Winsor & Newton for the most part although probably of lesser quality as well.
Utrecht
This is one of the least expensive artist quality paints on the market. It is therefore quite popular, even though it is available only via mail order or from a few select stores.
Rembrandt
These oil paints are perhaps a little more expensive than Winsor & Newton, but they have a good reputation for quality. Their paints are generally lighter and more mousse-like in texture than most.
Old Holland
Although it is not as large a company as Winsor & Newton, Grumbacher, or Talens, Old Holland oil paints are still reasonably widely available. They considered by many to be the finest of the major brands, and the price is consistent with this.
Gamblin
This is one of the more popular of the smaller brands. The paints are made by an artist, Robert Gamblin.
M. Graham
These paints are made with walnut oil instead of linseed oil. The advantages and disadvantages of this have been debated over the years, but the claim is that paintings made from walnut oil paints will yellow less and be less susceptible to cracking over time. One tradeoff is that walnut oil dries more slowly than linseed oil. M. Graham also makes an alkyd white, and by using this in conjunction with walnut oil colors for the rest of your painting, you end up with a curing time more similar to linseed oil, since white is mixed into most other colors.
Palette
Here, I do not mean the thing you squeeze your paint onto. I mean, the list of colors you squeeze out. Different painters use different palettes, and many alter their palette according to the painting.
Choosing a palette is such a personal thing, but I can mention some of the things artists often consider.
Color is the most obvious consideration in choosing a palette, but even there, there are several things you want to optimize in choosing your colors.
First, you want to be able to mix any color you might possibly need. This generally requires having at the very least the three primaries, and many artists prefer having two of each primary - a warmer and cooler variant.
Second, you want to make it easy to mix the colors you need most often. For example, a palette consisting of just the primaries may make it possible to mix a believable skin tone, but one that also includes some more subdued "earth tones" might make it easier.
You often hear artists talking about a "limited palette". This simply means having fewer colors available than one might otherwise choose. For some artists, 12 colors is limited. Others may routinely paint with only 6 and consider 3 a limited palette.
One reason to consider limiting your palette is color harmony. Roughly speaking, this is how good the colors in a painting look together. It is often easier to get colors that go well together if they are all mixed from just a few palette colors, rather than having every possible color on your palette.
Another reason to consider limiting your palette is that it is cheaper to buy a few tubes of paint than many. It is also easier to carry fewer tubes around, so plein air painters are especially likely to try to limit their palettes. And some argue that it is easier to learn to use just a few colors well than to try to learn to use many at once. I personally find color mixing greatly simplified when there are fewer colors on my palette - there are fewer choices, making it is easier to see what paints need to be mixed to get a given color.
In addition to the color of the paints, there are other considerations in choosing a palette as well. There is a lot of variance between pigments in price, so even within a single brand, some paints might cost three or more times as much as others. Again, price does not necessarily correlate with quality here, and quite viable palettes can be formed from the least expensive pigments. Also, some pigments are more permanent than others, and this too does not necessarily correlate with price. Some pigments are more transparent than others, and depending on your painting style you might have a preference for one or the other. Or you might have a preference for having both transparent and opaque choices. Finally, some pigments are considered toxic, and some artists choose to avoid these for health reasons.
So with all this said, somehow you have to get to the point of actually choosing your paints. There are some pigments that virtually every manufacturer offers, but the naming often differs, and there are many colors unique to a given manufacturer. Some colors offered by many manufacturers are actually mixtures of two or more pigments, and these mixtures will vary even between similarly-named colors from different manufacturers. There are far more colors available than I can tell you about. But I am listing some of the ones I often see people using.
The following colors are the full-intensity colors, sometimes just called the color wheel colors. They are listed more or less in color wheel order. Remember, between two similar colors, the warmer one is the one closer to orange on the wheel, and the cooler one is the one closer to blue.
• Azo yellow - cool yellow
• Cadmium yellow light / lemon - opaque cool yellow. All cadmiums are expensive
• Hansa / arylide yellow - transparent neutral (neither especially cool nor warm) yellow
• Cadmium yellow medium / deep - opaque warm yellow
• Cadmium orange - opaque
• Cadmium red light / medium - opaque warm red
• Naphthol / Pyrrol red - transparent warm red
• Alizarin crimson - transparent cool red, seldom used any more because it is not very permanent
• Quinacridone red / rose / violet - transparent cool red
• Dioxazine purple - transparent
• Ultramarine / French ultramarine blue - transparent blue on the violet side
• Cobalt blue - transparent neutral blue, very expensive
• Phthalo blue - transparent blue on the green side, extremely powerful (some say overpowering)
• Prussian blue - transparent greenish, coppery blue
• Cerulean - opaque, light greenish blue, expensive when genuine but often produced as a mixture of cheaper pigments
• Viridian - deep, transparent cool green, expensive
• Phthalo green - transparent cool green, also very powerful
• Sap green - warm green, often a mixture of pigments
The following colors are less intense, and are often referred to as the earth tones.
• Naples yellow - very light and somewhat dull yellow, sometimes used as a substitute for white
• Yellow ochre - dull mustard yellow
• Burnt sienna / red oxide - reddish brown
• Burnt umber - dull brownish gray
• Payne's gray - gray from a mixture of pigments
• Black - several different options available here
• White - several different options here too; titanium is probably the most popular
Of course, I am not suggesting you have all these colors on your palette. But hopefully it well help you decide what colors interested you. It might also help you understand suggested palettes you find elsewhere.
One word on black, which is probably the most controversial of pigments in oil. Some say you should not have it at all, some say have it but do not rely on it every time you you want to darken a color, and some simply love it. I am of the opinion that it should be thought of as a color like any other. If you are trying to limit your palette and include only a bare minimum to get the job done, black is clearly not necessary. Most colors can be darkened effective by mixing in their complement, and a reasonable approximation to black itself can be mixed simply by combining other dark pigments. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with black pigment that would make me avoid it if I was including other so-called "convenience" colors - ones you can reasonably mix yourself - like purple, orange, green, or any of the earth tones.
Once you have chosen your colors, you can arrange them physically on your palette any way you like. But of course you do need a physical palette to do this on. Most traditional is wood that has been primed to make it less absorbent, but glass and plastic palettes are also used. There are also disposable palettes, which are pads of paper that has been specially coated to make it less absorbent.
As for the process of squeezing out the paint, typical is to squeeze them out along the edges of your palette, in blobs of about the same amount you would use to brush your teeth. Many artists put the colors in color wheel order. The center of your palette is left clear for mixing.
Mediums And Solvents
There is a large variety of painting mediums (and for whatever reason, in this context, the plural of medium is usually "mediums", not "media") on the market. These are substances that you can mix with your paints as you apply them to get different effects. Some mediums are designed to speed up drying, others to slow it down. Some are designed to make paint more fluid, some to make it more like paste. Other mediums are designed to make paints more transparent.
Strictly speaking, mediums are not necessary in order to paint with oil, and many artists - especially plein air painters, who are always looking to cut down on unnecessary supplies - do not use them at all. But some paintings techniques - especially ones that involve painting in multiple layers over the course of days, weeks, or months - require the use of mediums. I will discuss this further in the section on Making Marks.
As a more or less separate issue, there are solvents. You can use a solvent as a painting medium, and it has the effect of making the paint more fluid, transparent, and faster drying. But solvents are also used for cleaning brushes, both between strokes and at the end of a session, and for other general cleanup of oil paint. And a rag dipped in solvent can be used to wipe paint off the surface, to correct or lighten an area. Solvents are by nature pretty toxic, and one reason the main reason water miscible oils are so popular is that they allow you to avoid solvents entirely. The traditional solvent is turpentine, which is not only toxic as a liquid but also gives off very powerful fumes and care should be taken using it indoors. Odorless mineral spirits are popular today, although they are almost as toxic - the fumes simply do not smell as strong. Some are turning to citrus based solvents, which are less toxic in some ways, but still not to be taken lightly.
Although few seem to realize this, solvents are not actually necessary for cleanup even with traditional oil paint. Oil can be used instead. Some people use cheap vegetable oil for cleaning their brushes, although it would concern me that this is not a drying oil, and any oil left in the brush might interfere with the paint. I use walnut oil, which is the same oil my paints are made from. I can use this oil as a painting medium - which makes the paint more fluid but also slower drying - as well as for cleanup. Walnut oil is more expensive than vegetable oil, but I use so little of it - about a tablespoon or two per painting - that it hardly matters. You do have to be careful to buy walnut oil with no preservatives, which would function to retard the drying even further.
Surfaces
There are basically three different types of surfaces that artists use for oil paintings: stretched canvas, canvas-covered boards, and gesso-primed boards. Any of these can be bought ready-made, or you can construct your own, usually for less money. Some artists will also experiment with painting on paper on metal or other surfaces, but the majority of paintings are on one of the aforementioned surfaces.
Oil paint by its nature is somewhat corrosive, and most surfaces need to be protected from these effects by priming with either a glue or an acrylic gesso. When you buy ready-made canvases, they are already primed. If you make your own surface, you can either buy pre-primed canvas, or buy raw canvas and prime it yourself.
Stretched canvas is canvas that has been stretched tight like a drum head across a wooden frame called a stretcher. Stretched canvas has the advantage of being relatively lightweight even in large sizes. Canvas covered boards are popular for plein air work as they are generally thinner than the stretcher bars, making it easier to transport several of them. You also do not have to worry about the sun shining through the back of a board. Cheap canvas boards are made from cardboard. Better ones are made from some sort of wood. These boards can also be primed directly, without first covering them with canvas. The surface feels quite different from canvas, as it is generally smoother. Some prefer this, some do not.
Brushes and Other Tools
To further add to the confusion faced by beginning oil painters, there are as many different brushes to choose from as paints and mediums. The good news is, you can get by just fine with very few brushes. It is not unheard of for plein air painters to use just one brush for an entire painting, although most prefer having a couple of different sizes available. And it is more convenient if you have different brushes for different colors - less cleaning between strokes is necessary. Literally having one brush for each color is not necessary. You can still get some benefit from using one brush for dark colors, another for light. Or one for warm colors, another for cool. Either way, you reduce the risk of creating muddy colors by inadvertently mixing very unrelated colors together.
Brushes come in different shapes, materials, and sizes. The common shapes are:
• Round - an elongated cone
• Flat - rectangular when seen straight on, thin from the side
• Filbert - like a flat but with rounded corners on the tip
• Bright - a relatively short flat
Other specialty brushes are available, such as the fan blender, which some used to softly blend colors together after they have already been applied.
While many people do use different shaped brushes for different purposes, there is relatively little agreement on which shapes are best for which purposes. And in fact, it is just as common for an artist to use only only shape for all parts of a painting. Filberts are probably the most popular choice. I am finding I prefer the variety of marks I can make with a flat for most purposes, although for final detail work, a small, soft, round seems to work best for me.
This leads to issue of brush material. Hog bristle is the standard, and it is fortunately fairly cheap. There are also synthetic brushes that mimic the behavior of bristle, and these can be cheaper still. The key attribute of these brushes is that they are fairly stiff, allowing them to pick up and move thick paint easily. However, when you are trying to lay new paint on top of an existing layer of wet paint, you often want a softer brush that will not disturb the existing layers as much. Sable is one of the traditional choices here, but it is expensive, so synthetic sable substitutes are a good choice for this purpose.
A given brush company will offer a line of brushes in a given material of a given quality, and usually offer several sizes of each of the above shapes within that line. The sizes are numbered, but the numbering is very inconsistent from brand to brand. About all you can be sure of is that within a shape within a given line, higher numbers are bigger. But what one company calls a #6 round might be a #9 from another company. And even within a single line, a #8 filbert might be much larger than a #8 bright. So it is unfortunately difficult if not impossible to give advice on brush size.
The one piece of advice most educators seem to agree on is that you should use bigger brushes than you might otherwise think, to avoid getting too caught up in detail too soon. I definitely agree with this. When I work on an 11x14" canvas, much of my painting is done with a filbert brush that is almost an inch wide, which I alternate with a flat that is only a little smaller. As I progress, I start relying more on a pair of brushes maybe half that size. But although I do have a small soft round brush - about the size of the tip of the tail of a mouse - that I reserve for final details, most of my paintings do not require this level of detail.
My recommendation, then, is to have a couple of relatively large brushes - from most manufacturers, this means numbers in the teens - that you can switch between (light and dark or warm and cool) for much of the painting. Also a couple of medium sized ones you can use the same way. And if you do get a brush numbered 1 or 0, do not expect to use it much.
The other tools typically used by oil painters are knives. These are not knives in the sense of being particularly sharp, but you probably would not be allowed to take them on an airplane. There are palette knives and painting knives, and some people maintain there is an important distinction between them, but others do not bother, and instead simply note that there are different shapes of knives available. They can be made of metal, usually with a wooden handle, or plastic.
Knives are used for three purposes: to mix paint on your palette before applying it, to apply paint (as an alternative to using a brush), and to scrape off your palette when you are finished painting. The latter use is probably the only one that pretty much requires a knife, or some sort of scraping device. A long flat knife is best for this. Using a knife for mixing colors is not strictly necessary, as you can do this with a brush as well. But it is easier to wipe off a knife, and therefore easier to mix clean colors.


Cold Morning (Oil, 11x14")
This was painted entirely with a palette knife,
because I forgot to bring my brushes that day.
Note how the texture differs from my other oil paintings.
Using a knife to apply paint to canvas is something that a few artists do a lot - some to the point of not using brushes. Others never use a knife for this purpose. Others use the knife this way on occasion for the effects it can produce. It is easier to lay clean color on top of existing wet paint with a knife than with a brush. A knife stroke looks different from a brush stroke, so if you do mix brush and knife work in a painting, it pays to be aware of this, so you do not have some passages that stand out as being different from the rest if that is not your intention. But that might be exactly the effect you want.
Making Marks
This leads directly into the matter of how we apply paint to the canvas. Oil painters tend to use one of a handful of basic approaches to painting, and the approach you choose has a lot to do with the techniques you will use.
The approach I am most familiar with is called alla prima painting, which basically means completing a painting in one session. With oil paint, that means the paint is always wet, so if you ever need to put one color over another - and I do this all the time - you are working wet into wet. The challenge here is avoid having the layer underneath muddy up the layer on top. One way to do this is to apply the first layers sparingly - either using a mostly dry brush with little paint on it, or by so diluting the paint with solvent (not oil!) that it can actually dry in just a few minutes. If you need to layer paint on top of thicker paint than this, you can use a medium such as oil to make the top layers more fluid, which can help it stay on top. You may also find either softer brushes or a knife can make applying paint on top of wet paint easier. But you should also consider simply expecting some mixing of layers to occur, and in fact to depend on it. For example, if the first layer is red, and you want it to be more orange, instead of mixing up just the right orange and trying to lay it on top without mixing, try simply laying some yellow on top and doing the mixing on the canvas. This approach works if the colors are related, so the corollary to this is, try to avoid putting down color that is unrelated to what you want the final color to be. if you have to do this, put it down as sparingly as possible.

House With Wagon (Oil, 11x14")
Like almost all my work, this was painted en plein air,
and was completed in one session.
Alla prima painting is the norm for plein air painters. Studio painters may work alla prima, but at least as many prefer to working in layers. This means painting one layer and letting it dry before working the next. While one can approach this as simply alla prima painting that has been slowed down, and with less worry about layers muddying each other, the traditional reason for working in layers is to use the technique of glazing. This involves building up colors through layers of transparent paint. For example, if you had a red area you wanted orange, you would first allow the red area to dry - possibly a matter of days. Then you would mix your yellow paint with a special glazing medium to make it fluid and transparent, and add a thin layer on top of the red. The result would be an orange with a different look that you would get if you simply mixed the red and yellow.
When working in layers, it is important to honor the fat over lean rule. A lean layer has relatively little oil - either because there is little paint period, or because the oil paint has been diluted with solvent. Fat layers are paints applied full strength from the tube, or applied with the addition of a medium contains yet more oil. The lean layers below will dry faster than the fat ones on top, which is what you want. If you painted a lean layer over a fat one, the fat layer would not actually have completely cured yet, and the new lean layer would actually cure before the fat one underneath ever finished. As the fat layer continued to cure, it would tend to cause the already dry lean layer above it to crack.
So, once you have decided on a basic approach, it is finally time to actually pick up the brush. Every artist has their own technique here, but the basic order of operations is usually similar.
The first step is to make sure the brush you are using is clean enough. I find a good wipe with a paper towel is often enough, but for a more thorough cleaning, you can swirl the brush in solvent or oil first.
You can use a knife to premix the color you want to apply if you like, but in many cases it works as well to simply grab some paint with your brush, move it to a clean area of your palette, and then take the other side of the same brush and grab a bit of another color to mix in. It is usually wise to start by guessing which color you will need more of in the mix and start with a good quantity of it, then add the lesser color just a little bit at a time until the color is right. Otherwise, you will tend to overestimate how much of the lesser color you need to start with, and it will take a whole tube of the dominant color to get the mixture right.
Once you have a mixture, dip your brush in, and stroke the canvas. That is the easy part! Depending on how much paint you loaded, you can keep stroking on a dry canvas until the paint on the brush is gone. If there was already a layer of wet paint on the canvas, however, you might get just a couple of new strokes before you need to wipe the brush off and get fresh paint - each stroke is likely to pick up as much old wet paint as it deposits new paint. The workarounds of using a medium to make the top layers more fluid or using a softer brush might gain you a couple of extra strokes at most.
That is the basic cycle. When you are done applying a given color, you clean your brush - again, a simple wipe may be sufficient - and start again. Or switch to a different brush if you are changing colors drastically and want to lessen the risk of creating muddy mixtures.
When you are done painting for the day, brushes will usually need a more thorough cleaning, or the paint left in them will dry and ruin the brush. This means a longer swirl in the solvent or oil, perhaps working the brush on the palette to remove the paint further, wiping the brush well, and possibly repeating this whole process. You should also scrape the mixtures off your palette, although the remainder of the original blobs you squeezed out along the edges can often be left alone and reused for a few days.
My Palette
I started off using the so-called split primary palette - a warm and cool variant of each primary - plus burnt sienna and of course white. I never felt limited by this, but I began to notice a few things. I almost never used the burnt sienna. And eventually I came to realize that I was tending to choose one of each primary for a given painting, and then to stick with it. That is, while I had two reds, if I used the warm one for one thing in the painting, I would tend to want to use that same red anywhere I needed red, to aid color harmony. And this did not really introduce any major hardship. It is true that mixing a good orange was a little trickier if I was using the cool red and yellow instead of the warm, but I found I could produce perfectly acceptable results by simply making sure I started with a clean brush or palette knife.
So I started using just a neutral yellow, a cool red, and ultramarine blue. I liked the ultramarine because I like intense violets and dull greens in my landscapes, and ultramarine lends itself well to both. Every so often I would find the need to have a more intense green than I could mix this way, so I added an intense green to my palette. It also helps me get more realistic sky color when mixed with ultramarine blue. For a while I was still thinking mixing oranges were a problem, so I put the warm red back on in my kit. I would decide which red to use for any given painting before starting. Usually, it was the warm red for sunny days and the cool for overcast ones, or sunny days where I needed especially intense violets. I have found the warm red I have (naphthol) - is versatile enough that I almost never choose the cool one (quinacridone rose) any more. But realistically, I have found that the quinacridone is pretty versatile, too.
So my basic palette now consists of
• Azo / arylide yellow (a mixture)
• Naphthol red
• Ultramarine blue
• Phthalo green
• Titanium white
• Quinacridone rose - just in case
As it happens, this is very similar to the palette preferred by a number of other more well-known landscape painters, including Scott Christiansen and Kevin MacPherson. I do not think Scott uses or recommends the phthalo green, but I find it a useful addition for the reasons I mentioned. Scott mentions use a red like naphthol while Kevin mentions one more like quinacridone rose, but again, I find either works pretty well.
This palette is admittedly optimized for landscape work, but I have used it for portraits and figures and been just as happy with the results. Some people cannot imagine not having earth tones or colors that more closely resemble skin on their palettes, but with a palette that offers so few choices, it is easy enough to figure out what colors you need in order to mix any other color you want. It is just a matter of how much of each to use, and it doesn't take much experimentation to figure that out.