Oil Painting Guide For Beginners: TECHNIQUES

Firstly, it's very important to start with a pre-primed canvas. Most canvases that you can buy in an art shop are pre-primed - this means they've been coated with a glue to seal in the fibres and stop the oil content in your paints from rotting them. Then they are given several coats of bright white priming paint and sanded smooth. You can read more on canvases in my Squidoo OIL PAINTING GUIDE TO CANVASES.

So, now you are ready to apply your paint! I've put together a guide to the paints you may want to buy and all the oils and mediums you may want to mix with them on my Squidoo OIL PAINTING GUIDE TO PAINTS. Most people apply oil paint in a number of layers. If you only want to work in one layer then of course this is fine - it's a stylistic choice. But you may find the white of the canvas peeping through and find that you need at least two layers. I usually apply paint in two main layers - first blocking out large areas of colour, then working a more detailed layer over the top when the first layer is dry. Finally I'll touch up bits here and there. Here's an example of the first layer of an oil portrait of mine and a final layer.

You may find that starting off with a bright white layer isn't helpful because it's hard to judge tones against - you might prefer to give the canvas an undercoat in a base colour that's more of a mid-tone - a brown, or blue-ish grey for instance. This may be particularly useful if you are painting from observation as it will help you to value what you are seeing more accurately. Even if you then completely paint over this base colour, it will give a tone (cool, or warm) to the paint that you apply over it. You can even choose to allow the base colour to seep out at the edges of your forms. You can see an example of the use of a warm brown ground (under-layer) in this unfinished painting of by Gainsborough of his own two daughters.

Whatever your first layer, at this point we need to introduce a really important rule. People often think that the technique for painting in oils is really difficult - I honestly don't think it is! There are really just two rules you should follow to make sure your painting dries well and survives the test of time.


The first rule is this: when adding Artist's turpentine or White Spirit to dilute your oil paints, add a few drops of Linseed or another oil as well so that your paint doesn't get diluted so much that it no longer has enough oil in the mix to bind it - this will cause paint to crack and fall off later on, like this painting here. I cover this point much more fully in my Squidoo OIL PAINTING GUIDE TO PAINTS and explain all about Spirits and Oils that you may want to buy.

Rule 2 is the 'FAT OVER LEAN' rule. You may have already come across this well-known rule for oil painting. It simply means that it's not a good idea to put a thin layer of oil paint over a thick layer. This is because the thin layer of paint will dry faster than the thicker layer below, mostly because it's a thinner layer but also because it has greater exposure to the air than the lower layer. As the thicker layer below then slowly dries it will contract and move a little, causing the paint below to crack. An important fact to know about oil paint is that although it will seem dry to the touch in between a couple of days and a couple of weeks (depending on the pigment and which oils it has been mixed with - again see my Squidoo-OIL PAINTING GUIDE TO PAINTS) in fact the chemical changes will continue for many years. Oil paint dries from a process of oxidization as the oils that the pigments are mixed with in the tubes (usually linseed or safflower oil) are exposed to the air. This process takes a very long time - oil paints are not considered to be truly dry for decades! This is why, for example, you should never varnish an oil painting for at least 6 months after it is finished.

So, in an ideal situation, each subsequent layer of your paint would be thicker than the last. For your base layer, whether you are using the paint out of the tube or have mixed it much thinner with spirits and oils, make sure you only put a thin layer of it on the canvas and use a stiff brush to work it well across and into the canvas.

If your upper layers are particularly thick, as in this example of 'impasto' by Van Gogh (impasto, deriving from the Italian for 'dough' or 'mixture', simply means a very thick layer or paint) then add plenty of oil (linseed, poppy, Liquin, etc) to the paint to keep it as flexible as possible. This will decrease the likelihood of it cracking later on. In fact as a general rule it's better if each subsequent layer contains more oil than the last.

Next - what to apply your paint with? Brushes are usually sold as being specifically for one particular type of painting: watercolour, acrylic, oils and so on. They are made from a wide variety of animal or synthetic hairs - brushes for oil painting are nearly always made of hog's hair which is stiff enough to manipulate thick oil paint. I find that using softer brushes with oils with always ruin them pretty quickly. However, it's hard to find extremely small hog's hair brushes, so for very fine details I use a little  synthetic brush - choose ones which say they are for Acrylic paint as these will last better than sable brushes made for watercolour. I like Sterling Acrylix brushes.


For painting with very thick paint you may even prefer to use a palette knife, as Van Gogh probably did, above. You should buy a palette knife anyway as it's important to mix your paints up with one rather than using your brushes which will quickly be ruined if used for this purpose.

So speaking of mixing your paints:
You can of course use a traditional wooden palette if you like, though of course you'll have to clean it and scrape off any dried paint, all of which is rather messy and time consuming. I use 'tear' off palettes like the ones below, although I try to keep a sheet going as long as possible for both cost and environmental reasons! If you have a patch of muddy mixed paint that you don't need any more, scrape it off with your palette knife and wipe the area with kitchen paper dipped in spirits. This will give you a nice clean area you can add more paint to. When you've finished a painting session, cover your palette with Clingfilm/ Saran Wrap. Oil paint will only start to dry if exposed to the air so covering it with a plasticky film will keep this happening.

And here's another tip for keeping your paint workable: if you've mixed up a big batch of colour that you want to keep, rinse out a mini-jar of jam or other conserves and put it in that! If the paint doesn't reach up to the top of the jar, cover it with water to stop the air getting at it. When you are ready to use the paint again you can just pour the water off.

For cleaning your brushes, use White Spirit from a DIY store. Now even though this is cheaper than using Artist's White Spirit for this purpose, you'll still find that you get through a lot of it! You can make it go further by 'recycling it'. When you come back to your painting, take a look at your jar of spirits. If you've left it at least overnight you'll see that the paint sediment has settled at the bottom, leaving fairly clear liquid above. Pour this clear spirits off into another jar, straining it through a paper coffee filter or kitchen paper if you like, then throw away the paint sediment and return your spirits to your jar. You can do this quite a number of times before needing a fresh jar. Make sure that before you immerse your brushes you wipe off the excess paint on an old rag or kitchen paper as this will also keep your spirits cleaner for longer.

Finally, I find I have a real problem if leaving a drawing overnight to dry with dust settling on the paint and sticking to it. You can limit this problem by leaving your drawing propped up to dry rather than flat on a table, but to eliminate it altogether, make yourself a box to keep your paintings in which is nice and shallow - say a couple of inches deep. I make flat boxes with 'foamboard' or 'foamcore' sheets which you can buy in an art shop and cut with a craft knife before sticking or even just pinning them together with dressmakers' pins. Foamboard is extremely light and easy to cut - here's what it looks like.

Anna Bregman is a portrait artist who specialises in painted portraits and pencil portraits and likes working in both oils and graphite. Based in London she trained in design and art history, where her interest in portraiture began. She particularly enjoys creating child portraits. Visit her website to consider commissioning a portrait and for many more tips on oil painting materials and techniques.



Link: Kidkraft's Annabelle dollhouse Visit website  and Savannah dollhouse Visit website