The Canvas

Canvas is the most popular surface used in oil painting. It is traditionally made from linen, but since it is relatively expensive, cotton will also do. The canvas is commonly prepared for painting in several steps, which can be done at home for better bargain buy: first, the canvas is stretched across a wooden frame called the stretcher (or strainer), and is tacked or stapled tightly to it. Next, the artist usually applies a ground (see Oil Painting Tips and Techniques ) to protect the canvas from chemical reactions with the paint. Gesso, which is calcium sulfate mixed with animal glue, is commonly used as the ground for the canvas. It must be stressed here that a canvas, whether it is of the stretched type or the board type, must be primed prior to oil painting or else the paint will eat away at the substrate. Other surfaces that can be used in oil painting include wooden panels, linoleum, pressed wood, and cardboard.

The Brushes

Brushes are made up of natural or synthetic hairs gathered up in a metal band, called the ferrule, which can either be aluminum, nickel, copper, or nickel-plated steel. Using a brush is the most popular way to apply paint (or ink) onto a surface, as well as prepare paints by mixing them on a palette. They can be either stiff or soft, and both have their pros and cons. Oil paint brushes are usually sable of bristle. Since turpentine can easily damage synthetic bristles, these types of brushes are not suitable for oil paintings. The different types of brushes include: Round, Flat, Bright, Filbert, Fan, Angle, Mop, Rigger.

The Paints

Oil paintings are named after the type of paint used: a slow-drying paint containing organic oils. The most popular oils include linseed oil as well as oil from poppies, walnuts, and soy beans, which are cheaper substitutes. Pigments in oil paints may be either mineral salts (lead, zinc, titanium, cadmium), earth types (sienna, umber), or synthetic types. Oil paint is considered relatively more complex to use than acrylic or tempera; it is water-resistant and uses toxic solvents like turpentine or benzene. Likewise, the pigments are notably toxic in nature (lead, cadmium). In addition, linseed oil is known to ignite spontaneously. Your options for buying oil paints include: fast-drying oils in tubes, water-mixable oils in tubes and pans or blocks, and oil bars, which come in stick form but are not oil pastels. Paints labeled with "hue" (e.g., cadmium red hue) at the end are artificial ones — they are prone to fading, don't keep their color during mixing, and get muddy easily.

The Palette

A palette is simply a thin piece of board, usually with a thumb hole, which holds oil paints that an artist mixes together.

The Palette Knife

A palette knife consists of a flexible steel blade with no sharpened cutting edge. A symmetric palette knife with a rounded tip is usually for mixing oil paints on a palette, while an asymmetric knife has a pointed tip and used is for painting on the canvas. Certain oil painting techniques make use of palette knives.

The Thinner

Thinners dilute oil paint, most often to clean your brushes and palette. The most common substance for thinners is turpentine; it keeps oil paints oily but usually has a strong odor. Using mineral spirits also keeps oil paints watery. These materials must be handled with care in a well-ventilated area. It is advised not to use paper, plastic, or styrofoam cups as containers for mediums and thinners.

The Mediums

Mediums also dilute color in your oils, like thinners. Some make oil paints dry faster, increase gloss or transparency, or even reduce overdone thinning. Check the label for what the medium you're buying actually does. The most popular medium out there is linseed oil. While there are arguments about whether or not linseed oil actually causes certain light-colored paints such as white, including blue, to noticeably yellow over time, using poppyseed oil for these hues makes for a safe alternative. Again, as mentioned above: it is advised not to use paper, plastic, or styrofoam cups as containers for mediums and thinners. Mediums include oils (e.g., linseed, walnut, poppy, sunflower, lavander, clover), varnishes (Dammar, Mastic), balsam (e.g., Larch, Venetian, and Strasbourg turpentines, Canada and Copaiva balsam, rectified turpentine), and driers (cobalt, turpentine).

Alla Prima/Direct Painting
Painting not done in layers (which is the traditional way); literally "at once" in Italian.

Body Color
Adding white to the colors in the painting.

Broken Color
Painting small, disjoint areas of color, as in Impressionism or Pointillism.

Brush Marks/Knife Marks
Using brushes or knives to highlight surface textures.
ing "lean" oil (less oil than turpentine in the paint) paint, which dries faster, under a "fat" oil paint (pure paint) layer

Frottie
Glazing with opaque colors, or a colored glaze mixed with white; using semi-transparent glaze or film

Glaze/Glazing
Applying a transparent medium that changes the color or texture of the surface, especially to regulate tones; must be completely dried up before a new layer is applied on top of it.

Grisaille
Painting entirely in monochrome gray; a type of underpainting of an oil painting.

Hatching
Applying cross-hatching brush strokes

Impasto
Applying thick paint such that marks and strokes by a brush or knife are visible; for textural effects and glazes

Masking
Using adhesive material to cover an area or create boundaries for where one is currently painting

Painting to Completiong in Sections
Performing Alla Prima by section; runs the risk of a disjointed-looking painting if careless

Pulling
Absorbing a surface using a cloth or sponge to "pull" back the underlying surface color

Rubbing
Using fingers to manipulate the paint on the canvas

Scoring
Scratching a painting to reveal an underlying layer; usually done to achieve the effect of skin and hair in paintings.

Scumble
Creating a broken color effect by loosely dragging the paint with a brush; different from the frottie in that it is thick but broken; usually uses a fairly dry brush

Spattering
Flicking a brush to transfer the paint on it onto the canvas

Teasing
Manipulating (wet) paint on the canvas

Three-Tone
Using light, medium, and dark tones only

Tonking
Having a sheet of paper absorb excess oil in a painting; named after British artist Henry Tonks

Toned Ground
Applying a stain over a priming (i.e., ground) before one begins to paint; commonly used colors

Using Ground
Allowing a portion of the ground to see through the finished painting

Varnish
Applying a protective film over a painting that results in either a glossy or matte surface

Verdaccio
Painting in greenish-gray colors for later layers in an oil painting; a type of underpainting; effective for creating flesh tones; popular among Renaissance artists

Washing
Thinning out thicker or purer paint layers

Wet-on-wet
Literally wet paint used alongside wet paint; produces a lighter look when the colors mix; "painting from light colors up"; leaves no time for drying up and is thus a quicker method of painting

Wet-on-dry
Literally wet paint used on already dried up paint

Before you even begin to paint, be familiar with the materials you're working with; that is, storage conditions, disposal, et cetera. Paints and other substances you'll be working with are toxic and hazardous, so be careful when handling them.

It is better to pick out a few expensive, high-grade oil paints with pure pigments than buy many cheap oil paint hues whose colors fade quickly.

Leave a border around your painting to give an allowance for framing or even experimentation.

You can save oil paint thinner by letting the muck settle to the bottom of your container, leaving you with clean thinner at the top.

Whatever the oil color arrangement is on your palette, simply remember to keep those hues in the same place next time you paint so that it will be a lot more comfortable for you.

Use a knife for mixing oil colors, and not brushes, since they're much easier to clean. Cleaning a palette knife, in turn, can be done by scraping off paint using a razor blade after dipping the knife in paint remover fluid.

You can clean your brushes with kerosene after oil painting.

Fill thinner waste with water then keep it closed airtight. Place oil painting supplies such as this one in a cool place to avoid them suddenly igniting.

It is said that when artists once mixed acrylic oils with oil paints, they got ill and even died. Remember that oil painting has some serious hazards when handling the needed.

Things to Remember Before Buying

Buying an oil painting is a personal experience; you must remember your own purpose for setting out to buy a work of art. While you may not necessarily be aesthetically equipped to make what people perceive as an "intelligent" decision, keep in mind that in the end it is your painting you are buying, not theirs. It is you who must be comfortable with the chosen piece. Be wise enough, nonetheless, to consult other people, but to do not blindly agree with their opinions, or shut out yours completely from the decision-making process.

How much does originality and authenticity mean to you? For contemporary artists, it is possible for you to ascertain first whether the oil painting you're buying is indeed one-of-a-kind and original. You can request for the artist's signature or a certificate of authenticity and detailed information about the artwork.

Of course, this may not be applicable if you plan to buy oil painting reproductions. In this case, a sensitive eye regarding a reproduction's faithfulness to the stroke and finish of the original work is of primary concern. Other things to note: what dimensions will your painting be — can you control this factor? Who are the artists behind the oil painting reproductions — how skilled are they?

Also be sensitive about the ordering process you'll be encountering — is it convenient and reliable enough for you? How about confirming your order? Shipping and taxes? Money-back guarantees? Ask the seller and the artist about these things, if possible. Do you homework.

Shopping for oil paintings is just like shopping for a good outfit; uninformed and rash decisions are not the way to go, and may only disappoint you in the end.

Your Options

Nowadays, buying oil paintings is as convenient as checking email — you can order online. Like buying paintings "offline," surfing the web to find that perfect oil painting for you has its advantages and disadvantages, so weigh them carefully. The ordering process is quick and simple, but you may be prone to online scams. Thousands of paintings are available (especially with reproductions), as well as personal sites of the artists themselves from which you can buy original directly from there, but viewing paintings from a computer monitor is still a completely different experience from viewing them in a gallery or exhibit.

When you order an oil painting, there are several ways with which they can send it to you. One is the traditional framed painting. Unframed paintings may also be shipped unstretched; they are usually rolled into a container and then shipped. Stretched paintings have the canvas literally stretched and pulled over a set of stretched bars and then stapled to them. These three types can affect the shipping costs of your painting.

This how-to is a simple outline you can follow if you are just starting to create an oil painting. Every artist will surely have his or her own ritual, but in oil painting, some steps naturally come after one another.

Study of the Subject

It is wise to be prepared regarding the subject or theme you shall paint. Scrutinize every detail of the object or scene you wish to paint and form this picture in your mind. It is said that majority of the process of creating an oil painting lies in this stage, but this may not become applicable to abstract paintings. Nevertheless, remember that Jackson Pollock took years to perfect his splatters, no matter how random they seem to be.

Setting Up

Your painting area must be comfortable enough for you to move about, set your supplies, and perform your strokes or experimentations. The room must also have good ventilation. If you're going to work outside, be careful about having your things knocked over by the wind or other external elements.

Unless you don't care about your clothing, wear an apron or frock. The same goes for your work area: lay down paper, plastic, or dropcloth, and make sure they're tacked firmly in place.

You may need (or want) to stretch your canvas beforehand. Also, if your canvas has not been thoroughly primed yet—make sure it is, even if it is labeled so—then be sure to prime it.

Lay out your supplies, such that they are all within reach. Don't be too rash about placing paints on your palette as you may not need all of them at once.

Find out about the most important oil painting materials you'll need in this article.

Painting

Staining the canvas ground more or less marks the "painting proper." Here you get to decide the underlying hue that will affect the overall look of your painting. It also serves as an encouragement when you feel your canvas looks too bare before beginning to sketch. You can choose to skip this step, nevertheless.

Sketching in the underpainting transfers the image in your head onto the canvas and gives you an idea where to do what with your colors. You can sketch on the canvas with another medium, such as acrylic or charcoal, depending on the effect you want to achieve.

The painting stage seems more like a cycle: since oil paint takes a long while to completely dry up—a day or two—and since it is traditionally accomplished in layers (see Oil Painting Techniques), it takes a lot of patience and dedication to complete an oil painting. If you're feeling adventurous (or impatient), you can paint wet-on-wet though! But in both cases, let your painting dry up in a safe place that's free from unwanted scratching and smudging.

Just remember that applying oil paint on a canvas is completely different from pencil-pushing and working on paper. For a reference on different oil painting techniques, such as frottie, scumble, grisaille, glazing, dabbing, masking, or pulling, read more here. These techniques are not just useful for adding variety and a different "look," but are also helpful in making adjustments or corrections to your painting.

Cleanup and Care

While you're in the waiting stage of the "painting cycle," it's essential to keep your painting materials in tip-top shape—not only because they're expensive or hazardous! Tightly cover the palette with plastic wrap; keep it airtight. Let the muck in your thinner settle, then use the clean portion. This is also the best time to thoroughly clean up your brushes, to be ready for another round of painting.

Once you're done with the finishing touches of your painting, such as glazes and varnishes and other protective measures, store your painting once more in a cool, safe place. Avoid rolling up your paintings as this causes them to crack and flake. Framing is a failsafe way to make your paintings more secure and possibly even better-looking.

One of the earliest – if not the earliest – artworks created by humans are paintings. As early as 15,000 B.C., man was portraying the world around him in cave paintings, such as those in Lascaux.

According to Wikipedia, oil paints were used in England as early as the 13th century for simple decoration. In the High Middle Ages, it is also possible that they were developed for decorative and functional purposes:

Oil painting, as an art form, began to gain steam in the early 15th century. The invention of the art oil painting is often credited to North European painter Jan Van Eyck, who plied his trade during the Renaissance. Van Eyck wanted to mimic nature in his artwork and create highly-detailed paintings that would make his subjects seem alive and life-like. However, the existing painting techniques and oil technologies then weren't suited to his pursuit of realism. Thus, he came to pioneer the art of oil painting, which became popular in his region of North Europe because it worked great in the cold climate there.

In the 16th century, oil painting began to rise in prominence in Venice, one of the centers of the Renaissance. The oil paint proved to be essential for painters who wanted a water-durable medium. Arguably the greatest oil painting was born in Renaissance Italy – Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

Presently, the most common use of oil paint is not in art, but rather domestic. The paint's durable properties and attractive, luminous colors make it a prime choice for both interior and exterior domestic use.

Oil painting is a type of painting that uses pigments ground into a medium of oil. This "oil paint" is a slow-drying paint consisting of small particles of the pigment that are suspended in drying oil. Currently, many artists hold oil paint in esteem, valuing it as one of art's fundamental parts.

When exposed to air, vegetable (organic) oils oxidize into a dry solid, a process which can be very slow. Though most oils become dry to touch in a day or a few weeks, it can generally be varnished only after six months to a year. You might consider this extreme, but art conservators consider an oil painting to be completely dry only if it has aged 60 to 80 years.

There is a variety of oils that can be used for oil painting, and these lend various unique properties to the paint, such as yellowing. Different types of oil can also differ in their drying times. Beginning from early modern Europe up to present times, linseed oil is the most commonly used carrier oil. It is a relatively expensive oil obtained by crushing the seeds of the flax plant; extracting the oil itself either uses heat, steam, or cold-pressing processes. Other carrier oils include the hemp seed oil, poppy seed oil, walnut oil, safflower oil, and soy bean oil.

In modern times, additives can be added to various organic oils listed above; these are often used to improve the oil's chemical properties. Such characteristics include having faster drying times, varying levels of gloss, resistance to UV, and suede-like finishes. There are also water-soluble oils that can be used with and cleaned up with water, and heat-set oils that remain liquid until heated to 265-280 degrees Fahrenheit.

The oil paint's color borrows from the pigment particles mixed with the carrier oil. For most of oil painting history, natural pigments such as mineral salts and earth types have been used. Examples of natural pigments are lead, zinc, titanium, cadmium, sienna, and umber. In recent times, synthetic pigments have become popular as they widen the spectrum available to painters.

Many natural pigments are toxic and pose a danger to the painter's health. One reason that they are still being used is that many such pigments possess unique properties that somehow offset (in the mind of the artist) the health risk. Examples of toxic pigments still in use for oil paints are lead carbonate (used for some white colors), cobalt (cerulean blue), and cadmium (some red and yellow hues).

It is a moot point as to whether the most extraordinary innovation of 20th-century art was Cubism or Pop Art. Both arose from a rebellion against an accepted style: the Cubists thought Post-Impressionist artists were too tame and limited, while Pop Artists thought the Abstract Expressionists pretentious and over-intense. Pop Art brought art back to the material realities of everyday life, to popular culture (hence ``pop''), in which ordinary people derived most of their visual pleasure from television, magazines, or comics.

Pop Art emerged in the mid 1950s in England, but realized its fullest potential in New York in the '60s where it shared, with Minimalism, the attentions of the art world. In Pop Art, the epic was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced awarded the same significance as the unique; the gulf between ``high art'' and ``low art'' was eroding away. The media and advertising were favorite subjects for Pop Art's often witty celebrations of consumer society. Perhaps the greatest Pop artist, whose innovations have affected so much subsequent art, was the American artist, Andy Warhol (1928-87).

The term ``Pop Art'' was first used by the English critic Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 issue of Architectural Digest to describe those paintings that celebrate post-war consumerism, defy the psychology of Abstract Expressionism, and worship the god of materialism. The most famous of the Pop artists, the cult figure Andy Warhol, recreated quasi-photographic paintings of people or everyday objects.

Mural painting art, a combination of architecture and fine arts, has infinite charm.

During the art form's development, it experienced a period of resplendence before gradually declining. However, with the development of architecture, the mural painting is slowly making a comeback. The mural painting, which has been applied in construction frequently, is paid great attention to and accepted by most people.

The content of the mural painting

The mural painting's content in the primeval period mainly reflected real life, such as hunting, grazing, planting, domestic animals, houses, dance, festivals, totems, and even witchcraft. It is said that heroic figures and historical stories appeared in the mural paintings as early as the time of the Yellow Emperor (Huang Di) and the Xia Dynasty (c.21st-c.16 century BC). Figures of Yao and Shun, both known as benevolent mythical Chinese rulers, and Jie, the atrocious emperor of the Xia Dynasty were painted with for propaganda and educational purposes.

The main mural painting artworks of the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) were later exvacated from the grave, which also reflected real life, historical figures and stories and fairy tales.

The content scope of modern mural painting, which often reflect the flavor of the ethic customs, splendid mountains and rivers, human civilization and science and technology apart from the traditional themes like historical figures and stories is larger than the traditional one.

The composition of mural paintings

The composition of the Han Dynasty's carved stone mural paintings were not restricted by the space-time For example, the "war", unearthed in Yinan County in East China's Shandong Province, portrays the picture of the war incisively and vividly. The bridge is the main axis in the picture. On the right of the bridge is the leader driving the carriage and on the left is the fighting scene. Under the bridge there are marines boating in the river.

It is great fun to complain about the art market and the promotional machine, especially the gnawing fear that the exaltation and trauma of aesthetic experience is irrelevant to that machine. But if we nobodies can offer any resistance, it is only by continuing the conversation at the level of irrelevancy. There is a lot of painting out there, and some of it is very good, but there is also anxiety about the discourse around painting, and a fear that we rarely advance past a scorecard of stylistic referents. This might be the price we pay for the permissiveness that comes with a lack of centrality.

At the 2007 College Art Association conference, Lane Relyea chaired a panel on abstract painting and the thickness of paint. This was in partial response to a question that emerged in Artforum’s 2002 roundtable on death-of-painting theory and its aftermath. Robert Storr complained about a crisp, graphic quality to some paintings, noting that it seemed as if the painter wanted to get the material aspect out of the way in order to focus on the image, which is usually borrowed from the broader media. The following remarks are adapted from my contribution to that panel.

I would not presume to claim for any artist that facture is unimportant. Paintings have material qualities, and the visibility of these qualities seems to vary according to climate. For example, the viscous tactility of Gerhard Richter’s 1960s black and white photo-based paintings is always striking. At the time, these were aggressively antagonistic to the craft of painting, but now they are positively luxurious. This is not just because we read them through the lens of Richter’s own sentimental turn, because in a book, they are just as polemical as was the younger Richter’s rhetoric. Their tactility is still almost invisible in reproduction.

Reproduction remains a key issue for painting today. While Richter took reproduction on as intellectual and plastic subject matter, problematizing both photography and painting, some painters today vault over reproduction as a given, producing work that appears made for reproduction, or already having been reproduced. Again, I will not say that a painting by Sarah Morris is without tactility, but her mode of pictorial organization is easily translatable into other formats, as is evident in her installation at Lever House. Nothing essential to Morris’ work is lost in this project, because, as a trafficker in images, she is concerned with the significance communicated by her crisscrossing lines and colored facets.

Part of Morris’s subject matter is arguably Modernism’s formal language as refracted through the mechanical and digital image stream. Her work contains the memory of Mondrian, but Mondrian in reproduction. This earlier artist’s facture is imbued with an awkwardness and urgency that might come from the belief that he was making a difference. It would be a mistake to attempt to rekindle the utopian ambitions of 20th century Modernism, just as it would be a mistake to take too seriously the either/or dialectic that seems to be set up by the preceding comparison. For the purposes of a discussion of facture I do not propose that we should divide painters into thick vs thin and then assign concepts like authenticity or cynicism accordingly. Rather, we should note that while the materiality of paint and surface is not a major issue for some, paint still speaks more than one language for the others. In other words, painters rely on tactility for different reasons. Thick paint can be deployed as part of an existent code, or it can be integrated with the surface of the painting in a way that intimates the ongoing process. The latter mode often uses less actual paint, but relies on the materials as having-been-worked, instead of as part of a pictorial code. A brief consideration of the work of Jonathan Lasker and Robert Ryman will clarify this opposition.

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Available in 5-gallon pails and 1-gallon cans, MetroPaint looks great on houses, business and apartment buildings, barns, gymnasiums, schools and more. Because the paint can be brushed, rolled or sprayed on and often covers in one coat, it receives rave reviews from contractors and painters who use it.

Colors

MetroPaint comes in colors ranging from white and cream to dark blue and barn red. Colors and quantities are subject to availability, so call ahead...

All colors dry to a low-sheen finish. Metro cannot offer any special-ordered tints and cannot guarantee an exact color match from one batch to the next. However, because Metro processes the paint in 300 to 900-gallon batches, you can buy paint for your project from the same batch.

Quality and use

Technicians use stringent methods to ensure that only good-quality latex paint is re-blended into recycled latex paint. MetroPaint is thick and rich and is considered to be comparable in quality to paint that retails for two to three times what Metro charges.

MetroPaint can be used inside or outside. Because the paint contains a combination of glosses, acrylics and enamels, many customers have reported that the paint is very durable and can be washed and scrubbed. You can use a brush, roller or paint-sprayer to apply the paint. MetroPaint has been filtered to industry standards for easy application and has been lab tested (see MetroPaint data sheets). One gallon may cover from 300 to 400 square feet, depending on application method and painting surface.

Where to buy MetroPaint

MetroPaint can be purchased at the MetroPaint store on Swan Island in Portland. It is also available at a few other retail locations in Oregon and Washington.

Certified and Premium MetroPaint Limited Warranty

The dried film of Certified or Premium MetroPaint will remain intact and free from functional defects for five years from the date of purchase if applied to an appropriate and properly-prepared and primed substrate in accordance with the instructions on the product label and product data sheet. If this paint does not perform as specified, return unused portion, along with proof of purchase, to the MetroPaint Store. Metro shall either replace the paint with paint of equal value at no cost to the purchaser, or refund the purchase price for the paint. See product data sheets for warranty details.

Where to drop off unwanted paint

The MetroPaint store does not accept paint and other hazardous material for recycling or disposal; it is a processing and sales facility only. Take unwanted paint, pesticides, solvents and other hazardous waste to one of Metro’s hazardous waste facilities in Northwest Portland or Oregon City.