Keeping to my New Years resolution of helping other artists, I have written a little general advice to people who want to be oil painters.

Essentials for anyone who want to paint in oils.

Life drawing skills are a must! I cannot stress enough how much this will improve your ability to paint and draw realistically. Take a life drawing class as often as you can to keep improving your skills.
Good equipment – Save up or splash out on a couple of decent brushes and a few good quality paints (suggested colours below) you can expand slowly, you don't need to be rich to start painting.
A good cleaning regime – keep your brushes and pallet clean, no point ruining your good brushes by leaving them covered in paint or festering in the jar of turpentine. Clean them as soon as you are done for the day with warm water and soap until the water runs clear, leave them to dry naturally.
The book: The Artist’s Handbook by Ray Smith will take you through almost everything you need to know about oil painting and more. I find it an invaluable reference.

Your pallet
The pallet you use will develop as you do but a good starting point would be to buy:

Titanium white
Lemon yellow
Scarlet lake
Burnt sienna
Burnt umber
Paynes grey
Terre verte
Raw Sienna
Cadmium yellow deep
Flesh tint

These are colours I use in every painting I do that have skin tones. I avoid buying black because it is such a flat colour. You can create much better dark tones from mixing two opposing colours together, for example a rich blue and a dark brown.

Buying paint
On a tube of paint you will see the name of the colour written, if it has the word ‘hue’ at the end this means it is an artificial pigment, and the colour will not go as ‘far’ as a natural one.

I will try to explain; think of the strength of colour in a pigment like the strength of taste in a hot chilli. Some hot chilli’s are tiny, only a couple of cm long and yet the tiniest bit of this chilli in a meal will make the whole thing very, very hot to taste. the flavor goes a long way with a small amount. In the same way, pigments in oil paint have many different strengths. Blue pigment, for example is very easy to find in nature, making it cheap for paint companies to use, therefore even student-grade oil paints have natural blue pigment in, a tiny dot of this blue mixed with other oils will go a long way. But other colours, like some reds are much harder to find in nature, so the oil paint companies make an artificial pigment called a ‘hue’ they put this ‘hue’ in their cheaper paints, and the pigment is not strong at all so you have to use a lot of it to get a good strong colour on your canvas.

When buying paints you will find them priced according to their ‘series’, paints range over 5 or 6 series depending on the brand. The cheap series paints will have many more hues in than the expensive ones. Don’t go buying all grade 6 paints, that’s a waste of money, but I do recommend you buy one or two of the more expensive paints, colours you use a lot or perhaps that are important to a particular painting you are working on. It's amazing the difference it can make to your work.

_{That's it for now, Will write more soon.}


[09.01.07]
Advice For Painters Part II

I was asked to write about the different mediums (Turpentine and oils) that you could mix with oil paint and the different effects they can create. I will cover the most popular mediums for now, and may go into others if people wish. Where I have listed adverse effects of these mediums, that is because traditionally these are seen as using the medium incorrectly, however in today’s art world any 'effect' has it's value so you may find these notes show possible areas of experimentation for you rather than things to avoid.

Turpentine (or Turps) - as a raw, un-distilled liquid is mostly used to clean brushes because when it used to dilute paint it will make the pigment particles in the paint gather in certain areas of the canvas and cause it to look grainy. this type of turps is very cheap. Drying time on canvas: <1 day. (FYI some people hate the smell of turps, you can buy odourless turps in any good art shop to avoid this problem)
Distilled Turpentine - can be mixed with oil paint to whichever thickness you like, but will evaporate completely so is not recommended for working with transparent layers. Drying time on canvas: <1 day.
Linseed oil - is by far the most popular oil painting medium, it is thicker than turpentine, drying into a thin film of oil perfect for painting in transparent layers. it is traditionally mixed with turps to create a good flexible medium to work with. However when dried it can turn lighter colours of paint yellowish. However if you mix too much of this into your oil paint it will make the layers dry shiny which will make the painting hard to view and impossible to photograph. Mixing it with distilled turps before using it to thin your oil paint will help to avoid this. Drying time on canvas: 2-3days.
Bleached Linseed oil - has all the same properties of Linseed oil but will not turn your lighter colours yellow. it is however more expensive than regular linseed oil. Drying time on canvas: 2-3days.
Liquin - is a modern day invention for thinning your oil paints, it doesn't smell like the other oils do and it increases the transparency of oil paints, making it very easy to use, it also dries the oil paint faster. I personally don't use it because it dries too fast for me. Drying time on canvas: 6 hours

Using oil mediums
I admit that I have an oil fashioned approach to oils and use a very traditional technique with my mediums. This is not the only way, but it is my way and it works very well.

1. Mix one-part Linseed oil with one-part distilled turps in a small jar. This mixture is what I add to my oils to thin them.

2. I work with a 'thin to fat' method. This means that each consecutive layer of oil paint should have more oil in it than the previous one. (Remember there is lots of oil in the paint itself, so you are actually decreasing the amount of linseed-turpsmix you add and increasing the amount of oil paint each time you put down a new layer)

I start with a very diluted layer; this will be quite transparent, allowing me to mark out the main parts of the painting. Once this layer is dry I will add another layer that is a bit thicker building up my painting, continuing in this pattern until I may finish the painting with just oil paint and hardly any linseed-turps mixed in at all.

This thin-fat technique gives me the opportunity to use transparent layers to create wonderful colours as well as let me build up slowly and make any changes I need. Painting this way will also guarantee your painting will not crack when it is old, the layers will dry in the right order over time avoiding damage to your painting.

If you try to put a thinner layer on top of a fatter layer you will find the new layer will not stay on the surface, it will collect in bubbles on the canvas. It will also make the painting crack as it dries out over the years.

_{That’s it for now, I will write about transparent and opaque paints next time.}

[Edit: 06.01.07] I thought I had already said it, but if shall say it again. There are many different ways of painting in Oils, this is just my way and my way is mostly traditional. This advice is not set in stone; in fact I encourage any artist - however well established - to experiment constantly with new ways of working. I write this journal so that I can help those who are confused by oils or confused by painting figures, it is also for people who want to know how another artist works.

If anyone has further questions or has specific work they want me to critique, please leave them in the forum thread I have started on my page here: [link]