Painting Overview
The Basics
- Surfaces
- Oil Paints
- Safety
- Mediums
- Fat Over Lean
- Hue vs Pigment
- Monochromatic Underpainting
- Why Not Black Paint?
- Glazing
- Varnishing
There are literally countless surfaces that can be painted on. Most common are canvas and paper. Other common surfaces include wood and plaster. Canvas panels are an affordable option as they are less expensive than stretched canvas and yet they have the same texture and feel as painting on canvas. The down side of using canvas panels is that they can warp over time if not framed.
I prefer to use Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Colors. They are a good quality paint and reasonably priced. For a good basic understanding of oil paints, try this article: Oil Paint Basics: Artist's Studio Education.
It is important to note that oil painting means working with some materials that are toxic. It is important to be safety-aware when working with oil painting materials. When choosing paints, look for the word "hue" in the color's name if you are concerned about the toxicity of the paint, as these tend to have less of the actual pigment. Never leave oil painting materials out unsupervised around children or pets, and be sure to clean up thoroughly when you are finished painting. Additionally, some materials used in oil painting are flammable. It is important not to leave these materials where they can get too hot, and never near an open flame.
The term "medium" refers to different substances that are added to the paint. There are many kinds of mediums and many artists combine several to make their own custom mediums. Mediums are most often used to make the paint flow more easily. Oil paint straight from the tube is thick and doesn't brush onto surfaces very easily. Using straight paint also uses a lot more paint, which is expensive! Some mediums include turpentine (and turpentine substitutes such as Turpenoid), linseed oil, Damar varnish, and Liquin.
Oil painting in the traditional style of the old masters requires painting in many layers, allowing the paint to dry before adding the next layer of paint. It is important to mix your paint and mediums with these layers in mind. Some mediums are oily, such as linseed oil. These are referred to as "fat" mediums. Some are more like solvents, such as Turpenoid. These are referred to as "lean" mediums. Lean mediums dry faster than fat mediums. An oil painting can take up to a year to fully dry, and it is important that the layers underneath dry faster than the layers above them. If the upper layers dry before the ones underneath them it will cause the paint to crack. The rule, then, is to always paint "fat over lean" meaning that you mix leaner mediums at the beginning of a painting, and gradually mix fatter mediums as you build up layers.
It can be confusing buying paint if you don't know the difference between, for example, "Cadmium Red" and "Cadmium Red Hue." The difference is that "Cadmium Red" uses cadmium pigment, which is an expensive (and toxic) material. "Cadmium Red Hue" is essentially artificial Cadmium Red. Hues tend to be less expensive and less toxic, however they do not have the same brightness and depth of color and don't tend to mix as well as the real pigments. At the student level, it's generally fine to go with the hue.
The way I learned to paint is a tried and true technique, used by the old masters such as Leonardo da Vinci. The first step is to create a monochromatic underpainting. The underpainting should essentially look like a black and white photograph of what you want your finished painting to look like. Monochromatic painting is, in itself, a valid finished style—I do a lot of them, such as the example to the right. With this technique, however, a full-color painting starts out like this as well. The concept behind an underpainting is that you are only working with value (light/dark) rather than with value and color at the same time. It is much easier to get an accurate "map" of the values of your painting when you're not also worrying about getting the color right. The more detail and value accuracy you can get in your underpainting, the better your finished painting will be. Viewing your source through a red acetate filter can help with value accuracy.
You may have noticed that I did not include black as one of the paint colors for my classes. Many artists (as myself) do not use black paint at all, or only in rare situations. Since black is a mixture of all colors, it can be mixed from existing colors you have. The mixed black will always look richer than a stock black paint. Additionally, adding black to darken other colors makes them look muddy. The method I teach does not use black paint, but rather teaches how to mix colors to achieve similar dark values.
Glazing is where the magic happens. That's when the colors finally go on. Glazes are colors mixed with medium so that they are transparent, which are then layered upon each other to create vivid, deep colors that couldn't be achieved with mixed opaque colors. Each layer must be dry before the next layer goes on, but the more layers of glaze are added, the deeper and more complex the colors become. Here is an example of a still life painting exercise at three stages: the underpainting, midway through the glazing process, and the finished piece.
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As I stated earlier, oil paintings can take up to a year to fully dry. They may feel dry to the touch, but if you varnish a painting too early, you risk the varnish cracking as the last moisture dries from the paint (varnish dries much faster than oil paint.) Ideally, you should not varnish a painting until a year after you finished painting it. (You can hang it on the wall in the meantime, though!)
There are a few reasons to varnish a painting. First, it protects the paint. Second, the varnish brings out the richness of the colors and accentuates the darker colors, which sometimes can look a little flat before varnishing. Third, it evens out the finish of the painting. When mixing paint with various mediums, different levels of gloss/matte result; also, some paint colors are naturally more shiny than others. This can make a painting reflect light in a "patchy" way. The varnish gives the entire painting a unified finish. Varnishes come in matte, gloss, and satin finishes, and are available as brush-on liquids or in spray cans.
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