Category: Oil Painting

A dilutant is a liquid which will thin down your paint so
as to make it easier to handle. Most common is turpentine, but gasoline, so long as it is purified, can be used.

You can dilute your color with oil, but this not only tends to make the paint greasy, it can also make the paint wrinkle and crack. When using turps to dilute your paint, it is a good idea to add a few drops of oil into it to allow for any breaking down of the binder. If too much turps is used to paint with, the paint could become powdery and flake off.

Driers

Driers to speed up the drying rate of the paint and so allow for quicker working, are usually made from varnishes and, as in the so-called McGuilp medium, varnish and linseed oil boiled with lead. The varnishes that can be used with paint are mastic, copal and dammer. Varnishes are also used to touch up a picture if it has gone dead or matt and for overworking. This type of varnish is known as a retouching varnish and is perfectly safe to use so long as you retouch when the paint is dry. It can then be worked over with fresh paint.

Mastic, copal and dammer are used as a final varnish over the painting when the painting is absolutely dry to protect the completed painting from dust and damp, etc. Salesmen will advise you on how to choose a varnish for final varnishing and directions are always given on the bottle. If you are doubtful about using them, there are some good synthetic varnishes to be bought which are foolproof to handle. Winsor & Newton’s ‘Winton Varnish’ and Rowney’s No. 88, clear picture varnish, are two of these.

The addition of a drier or a varnish to your paint is a matter of personal taste. A medium like McGuilp, or its modified, manufactured counterpart Maroger Medium, helps to facilitate the drying of the paint and gives it a nice buttery consistency which is delightful to handle.

An excellent medium is compounded with half oil (pale drying oil as it is termed on the art store’s lists) and half mastic. This forms a jelly which, when agitated, becomes liquid enough to add to the paint. For further information about this medium, see Maroger’s The Secrets of the Old Masters. Authorities disagree about the durability of using driers with the paint. But for a beginner, I would go so far as to recommend using a drier as this will help him overcome the initial difficulties encountered with a slow drying paint.

If you do not get on with them, you can return to using just the paint with turps. But don’t be afraid of experimenting with them. It all adds to the excitement of painting and will help you to get the most enjoyment out of it.

Canvases are usually flax or cotton/flax yarns, stretched over a wooden stretcher and kept taut by knocking small triangular pegs at the back into the corners where there is room made for them. They are best bought, as preparing and stretching your own canvas is a rather tricky operation for a beginner.

Canvas is delightful to work on. It can be bought with a fine or rough grain. And the movement of the canvas as you paint on it springs nicely to the brush. You can scrape wet paint off with interesting effect. They come in sizes ranging from 7 in. X 5 in. to 40 in. X 50 in. and even larger if specially ordered.

However, I do not recommend canvas until you have acquired a little experience with paper and hardboard. You won’t regret it and it will be something to look forward to.

Brushes

The brushes artists commonly use in oil painting are made of hog’s hair. They are harder and have more spring and toughness than the brushes used with watercolor. There are four shapes to choose from: flat, round, filbert and brights (Fig. 30). As you will see from the illustration, each type of brush will make a different mark. To begin with I would recommend the flat only. Number 4 and number 6 would do for a start, say two of each until you have had a little experience in handling them. Then you may like to try the brights. The square top of the brush would make a good contrast in brushmark to the flats. I suggest a 5 and 7 for this.

As with most aspects of painting, experience and experiment will help you find the brushes which suit you best. And it is a good idea to tryout all the shapes, eventually, adding one new shape of brush to your collection as you progress. It is not necessary to buy all the shapes at once. The fewer your brushes the easier it is to cope with the problems of painting. Similarly with colors, the simpler the palette the easier it is to cope with it. I follow this rule and find it perfectly satisfactory. Using few sizes and shapes of brushes, my only indulgence is to use oil sable brushes for fine work.

Sable brushes are excellent to use with oil paint but they must be handled very carefully and, if used with the same vigor as hog’s hair brushes, wear out very rapidly. As they are comparatively far more expensive than hog they must be used only in the final stages of painting.

Brushes must be thoroughly cleaned after use. If not, they will become hard or spoil their shape and ruin color when used again. The simplest way to clean a brush is first to rinse it out well in turpentine or turpentine substitute, dry it on a rag and then wash it in warm water and soap. It must then be thoroughly rinsed and dried. Do not use detergents as this does not clean the paint out well.

A dipper is merely a container to attach to your palette to hold turps or oil or drier to add to your paint. If you find them impractical to use, I suggest you keep your dilutants in jars or pots. This is more practical by far than keeping them in dippers.

You will always need plenty of turps for cleaning brushes and the wider the neck of the container the easier it is to do your work. Also when the jars get dirty it is an easy matter to throw them away and start afresh with a new jar, whereas if you use a dipper you will be constantly cleaning them after use. If you don’t they will foul up and be useless.

Jars also have the advantage of being cheap and if they possess a lid you can always put it back on after use and so preserve whatever dilutant or drier you have left.

Turps is used for cleaning brushes and for diluting paint and you will probably use plenty of it. For practical purposes it is better to have two containers of turps; one for cleaning and the other for diluting. In this way your diluting turps will stay cleaner longer.

Easels

The best and cheapest easel for oil painting is the type known as the radial easel and costs about $50 to $100 at an artists’ supplier. They can take the smallest or the largest canvas, are very strong, move into any position backward or forward and are ideally suited for painting. However, an ordinary folding sketching easel will do just as well as long as you don’t use too large a canvas (Fig. 29). The greatest fault with a poorly made sketching easel is that it wobbles. If it does, it can make painting in oils very trying.

Failing a bought or home-made easel, you can always prop up your canvas on a chair with your palette in front of it and sit to paint. Or, if you want to stand, prop it up on a mantelpiece. The disadvantage here is that it is better to tilt your canvas forward slightly for oil painting, as this shields the light and stops the paint shining.