Knowledge List of Oil Painting

Oil Painting Mediums Explained

from:how-to-draw-and-paint

As with other types of paint additives, there are a whole host of oil painting mediums to tempt you.
But which ones do you really need and which can you do without - at least for now /
It's easy to believe that your painting will be a complete mess unless you use each and every one of them - every time...
It won't. But a little prior knowledge helps as well.
Don't forget we're using the term 'Mediums' in this article in relation to oil painting additives and not in its other context as the type of paint you're using ie: acrylic paints, watercolor paints, etc.
Have a look here at the main oil painting mediums and a brief description of what each one does.
Oil Painting MediumsGesso Primer It may seem odd to start the oil painting mediums section with what is in fact an acrylic medium. However, it's widely used as a base coat for art canvasses when oil painting. Comments for gesso regarding acrylic paint mediums apply equally to oil painting mediums.
Turpentine The best known thinner and cleaner for oil paints and brushes. Use the distilled artists version rather than the household version for best finishes on your painting. Traditionally mixed 50/50 with linseed oil for an excellent medium. However, its powerful odor is not always welcome in the house and may be an irritant for some artists.
Low Odor Thinners An excellent substitute for turpentine, in all the areas mentioned above - without the smell!
Linseed Oil After turps, probably the best known of the oil painting mediums. On its own gives colors a high gloss. Added to colors it produces a glaze effect. Used 50/50 with turpentine or low odor thinners, it provides a good, general purpose paint medium for oil painting. Slows down drying time. Compared to some oils, it can go a little more yellow over a period of time.
White spirit A cheaper version of low odor thinners and turps. Ok for thinning paints for underpainting, but probably not for quality work. Fine for cleaning brushes.
Prepared Oil Painting Mediums Varying from one manufacturer to another, a combination of white spirit and other oils to provide a ready-mixed, user-friendly paint diluent. A beginner could use this, instead of mixing their own combination of oils and other additives.
Stand Oil A faster-drying version of linseed oil. Reduces consistency of paint and brush marks.
Poppy Oil For adding to lighter colors and white. Less inclined to yellow than linseed oil. However slower drying.
Gold size Although primarily intended for applying gold leaf, it provides a relatively fast drying oil-based paint medium.
Alkyd Gel & Liquid Oil Painting Mediums Alkyd oil paints are well known for their much faster drying properties than regular oil colors. Alkyd paint mediums can be added to conventional oil paints to speed drying time by up to 50%. Can also be used as a glazing medium. Like acrylics, the glazing technique is where a translucent color is painted over another, dry color. The lower one glows through but is affected by the density of the top glaze. Creating misty or smoky backgrounds is a good example of a glaze.
White Alkyd Paint Strictly speaking, this isn't a paint medium, but I use this a lot to speed the drying of conventional oils where I want a lighter tint or a highlight, as opposed to a glaze. The white alkyd paint, when mixed with other colors, acts in the same way as the alkyd gel, but doesn't lose the opacity of the color.
Gloss or Matt Picture Varnish A spirit based varnish, equally at home on acrylics as well as oils. Dries to a gloss finish and will not yellow or bloom. Gloss and matt varnishes can be mixed to give a satin finish. Can be removed with turpentine or white spirit.
Retouching Varnish A thin varnish which can be painted over a touch-dry painting to 'lift' areas where the oil has sunk into the canvas, leaving dull spots. Can also be used as a temporary varnish, say for exhibitions, where thicker paint on a recently completed painting may take many months to dry through completely. Can be removed prior to, or left on underneath, the final varnish coat.
Damar Varnish Dries in a few hours with a satin - medium gloss. Removable.
So there we are. If you've read this far, it'll be obvious already that several oil painting mediums do fairly similar things.
Probably the best ones to start with are Low Odor Thinners, one of the mixing oils such as Linseed oil and one of the other additives that promote quicker drying.
Then as you become used to them, try out the other oil painting mediums one by one. This way minimises confusion over what to use and when and stops you wasting your money.
Good luck!

How to Create a Body of Work and a Distinctive Style as an Artist

from:okpainting-arts

If you're looking to get gallery representation, or to sell your art in some other, more innovative way, we have to assume that you already have a body of work that consists of at least 20 or 30 works in a style, medium, colors, and subject matter that distinguish you from every other artist in some way.
Instead, here's what I'm seeing, over and over, from artists who would like a career in art, but seem stuck in first gear: versatility. Generally speaking, people don't want to know how versatile you are! With very few exceptions, I think you have to specialize for a long time before you can allow yourself the luxury of versatility.
In order to get people's attention, it's necessary to be recognizable, and it's just not possible to do that with a portfolio that's all over the map stylistically. And here's a hint: If you want to have a gallery represent you, that gallery owner is going to want to know what you are about, and if she likes it and thinks it's amazing, she will want more of those when she sells them all. What you need is a body of work.
I know I'm preaching to the choir to a degree here, that a lot of savvy artists already know they need a distinctive style, but I still hear many artists wondering out loud if they are somehow missing the mark.
An Exercise to Build a Body of Work
Here's an exercise to consider. Decide on a style, subject matter, palette, and value range that you love, and are comfortable doing. Narrow it down. Dogs? Too broad. One breed only. Too broad. One specific dog only. That would definitely help narrow down your palette. Do that one dog over and over, in the same narrow range of colors. But that dog has to be no ordinary dog. She has to breathe the very essence of dogness, and can become a symbol of a myriad of painting from the photo. Case in point -- Cajun artist George Rodrigue with his famous Blue Dog. Look at this installation shot of the Blue Dog in all her various incarnations.
But I'd take it even a few steps further. I'd do a series of 12 paintings of my dog on the same size and style of canvas (or paper.) My dog would probably have something in the background unrelated to dogs. And my dog probably wouldn't be just sitting there looking out from the canvas all iconic and everything. Mine might be doing something else. Anyway, you get the idea. Focus, focus, focus! You've got nothing to lose but a few art materials, and you might actually enjoy staying with a series enough that you'll do two dozen instead of just oil protrail.
If you like flowers, or landscapes, or seascapes, or birds, or fruit, apply this thinking process to any one of them. But no cheating. You have to choose just one thing! If it's flowers, not just flowers, not just one variety, but it's just one color of that variety. The more you narrow it down the better. If it's fruit, and if you choose apples or pears, it had better be spectacular -- or have some completely unique twist on it -- unless you want to compete with a bazillion other photos into painting and pear painters out there.
A Body of Work for Abstracts
Probably the most difficult one of all to tackle is abstracts. If you are an abstract painter, you have to make some different choices. A limited palette is good. But is it going to be geometric or organic? Atmospheric or hard-edged? Representational or non-representational? Saturated or subdued color? Textured or smooth surface? Choose. And make the same decisions you would if you were working with realistic subjects. When I made the decision to focus on one thing only, I spent four years working in a color-field style. Now I'm working in series, but try to keep each series together in one place.
The purpose of this is forcing yourself to choose Protect pet portrait and stay with it long enough to amass a body of work that looks like you! You don't have to stay with it forever, nor creation tone your explorations into other emulsion stuff , but it is extremely beneficial to prove -- to yourself as much as to your public -- that you have the ability to focus on the essence of a thing. You might come out of it with a really cool series.
The photo shows a series of 12 encuastic paintings I did on one copy point, the same size and shape (cradled wood panels, 12x12"). There are professors who prefer that you do a hundred, but a dozen will do for a start. Since I work non-objectively, sticking to one thing is even more of a challenge. If you did a hundred, you would have some discards, but you would undoubtedly see a pattern that would suggest a direction for you. Your style and body of classicality .