Part 1 Tony Hogan takes you through the basic materials needed to paint with oils before beginning a short series on painting tree studies for beginners
Oil paint is pigment blended with oil (usually cold-pressed linseed oil) and its richness, depth of colour, voluptuous nature, handling properties and smell remain unique. As a medium, oil paint has no substitute; it has a quality all of its own, often worked thickly (impasto) by some artists, yet in thin glazes, hardly more than a stain, by others. There is no right or wrong way to work with oils, and only one general rule applies – working thick paint over thin (known as fat over lean) works, but applying thin over fat leads to cracking at a later stage.
Today we are lucky to be faced with an abundance of excellent quality paints in an astonishing range of colours and hues, all available in easy-to-handle tubes. You will notice that all the different brands have their own ‘feel’ and buttery texture. Experimentation will give you the one most suited to your style and handling.
There are different forms of oil colours, one of which is traditional oil colour. This is generally available in two qualities: Artists’ and Student. The difference between the two becomes apparent when using. The buttery feel, the handling properties, the permanence and the depth of colour is far superior in Artists’ quality yet for the non-professional artist, Student quality can be most satisfactory and usually cheaper.
You will also find fast-drying (alkyd) oil colour, water-mixable oils, and oil bars and sticks.
Application
Oil paint can be applied to a support, such as a canvas, by many different means. Most common are brushes and palette knives although I have often reverted to using my hands, twigs, sponges and various other items in the completion of my work.
With brushes the most common and hard wearing are mixed-blend brushes, which come in a huge choice of sizes and shapes. A majority of brushes are made up of synthetic blends due to their hard-wearing properties. Sable brushes, normally the choice of watercolourists, are excellent (if rather expensive) for fine detail. I often use a squirrel hair mop brush for the fine blending.
Supports
The term support refers to the surface on which you paint. With oil, you can choose
