There’s a common misconception that oil painting is difficult. Students at my evening classes almost always started their explorations of painting with watercolour. They believed that was easier and oils were just for more experienced painters.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Watercolour is wonderful and challenging but perhaps one of the most difficult media to master, and let me explain why.
Firstly, watercolour is transparent, so you have to work from light up to dark. Usually that means building up in glazes, but whatever has gone before is visible. The beautiful translucent effects are achieved by light passing through the paint layers and being reflected back from the white paper. So too many layers kill the luminosity.
Oh, and while we’re talking about ‘white’, that’s generally achieved in watercolour by leaving areas of the paper unpainted. This can require careful planning and skilled brushwork.
Watercolour dries very quickly. For some, that’s a benefit, but though it rewards fast workers, its rather unforgiving of errors. Mistakes and changes are difficult to correct. You can’t paint over a layer except with a much darker layer.
The right paper is also important. It needs to be very absorbent so that layers sink in to different depths as they are laid one on top of another. Paper designed for printing is coated so that the inks sit on the top and is inappropriate for watercolour.
Oil on troubled water colour
Oil paints are totally different – well that’s not strictly true. All artists media are basically the same pigments, mixed with some kind of binder or medium. Some artists like to buy the pigment raw and mix with their medium of choice.
So, if you buy, say, some Raw Umber and mix it with gum arabic, you have a watercolour; mix it with oil (perhaps linseed or poppy seed) and you have oil paint. You can also mix it with egg to produce tempera, acrylic medium, – add a little chalk to make gouache.
Make it easy
But let’s get back to oil paint – why do I say it’s far easier to use than watercolour?
Firstly, it’s generally slow to dry. It can take hours or often days to dry completely. That means you can go back and work on for some time and still achieve subtle blends.
It was the Dutch who developed oil painting, primarily Jan Van Eyck in the 15th century. He was answering the problem of struggling with water-based paints which dried far too quickly when painting on large works.
Oils allow you to work at a more more leisurely pace and go back again and again and again.
If there’s an area you’re unhappy with, you have plenty of time to wipe away the paint with a rag and turps, or just scrape it off with a pallet-knife and paint it again.
The paint on your pallet may remain usable for quite some time too. Perhaps revive it with a little linseed oil or turpentine and it may save the need for mixing that subtle shade from scratch again.
Jack Sprat
You actually have a lot of control over the drying time. Artists talk about ‘fat’ and ‘lean’. If you add a lot of oil to your paint (fat), it dries very slowly, where if you use turpentine instead (lean), it dries much more quickly.
So, it’s common for artists to sketch out the subject or structure of their painting with washes of very thin, ‘lean’ paint. They can then work on this building up the picture – painting fat over lean.
Opacity v transparency
The second important advantage of oil paint is that it’s a very opaque medium. Where watercolor technique is generally to paint from light up to dark, with oil paint the reverse can be true. Dark areas are usually blocked in first, then opaque lighter coloured painting applied on top. No need to worry about leaving white spaces. Just let the paint dry enough, then paint light or white, on top.
Not either/or
But let me be clear. I’m not damning or dismissing watercolour – in fact it’s one of my favourite media – I love it, as you may gather from some of the paintings dotted around this site.
What I hope I’ve done is to remove some of the mystique of oil painting, and explained why there’s no need to fear it as it’s a very easy and forgiving method. And for a mistake prone artist like me, quite a blessing.
So pick up those brushes and make a start.