Oil Paints and Painting
Artists’ oil colours are made by stirring dry powder pigments with selected refined linseed oil until it reaches a stiff paste texture and then grinding it by powerful friction in steel roller mills. The smoothness of the shade is important. The standard is a smooth, buttery paste, as opposed to stringy or long or tacky. When a flowing or mobile element is required by the artist, a liquid painting medium such as pure gum turpentine needs to be mixed with it. In order to expediate drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, is often used.
First-rate brushes are made in two kinds: red sable (from different members of the weasel family) and bleached hog bristles. They both are produced in in numbered sizes for each of four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat shape but is shorter and not as supple), and oval (flat shape but is bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are generally utilised for a smoother, less robust type of brushstroking. The painting knife, a thinly tempered, skinny version of the artist’s palette knife, is a convenient method for applying oil colours in a robust way.
The usual support for oil paintings is a canvas of pure European linen of stable close weave. A canvas is cut to the necessary size and stretched over a frame, usually a wooden frame, and secured with tacks or, since the 20th century, by staples. To lower the absorbency of the canvas and to create a smooth surface, a primer or ground might be applied and left to dry first. The most generally utilised primers have been gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If density and smoothness are preferred over springiness and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, would be employed. Other supports, such as paper and various textiles and metals, have also been tested.
A coat of picture varnish is commonly set on to a finished oil painting to prevent any atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, or an harmful accumulation of dirt. This paint varnish may be removed without damaging the painting by experts using isopropyl alcohol and other such common solvents. The film varnish also takes the surface to a uniform lustre and sets the tone and colour intensity essentially to the levels originally created by the artist in the paint. Some painters, especially those who do not favour deep, intense colouring, keeping a mat, or lustreless, finish in their oil paintings.
Many oil paintings made before the 19th century were done in layers. The first layer was a blank, uniform field of thin paint called a ground. The ground subdued the glare of the primer and established a base of gentle colour on which to apply oil paint. The shapes and items in the painting were roughly blocked in by using shades of white, and gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The eventuating masses of monochromatic colours were called the underpainting. Forms would then be given definition with either ordinary paint or scumbles; irregular, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that displaying a whole lot of effects. At the completion stage, transparent layers of pure colour called glazes could then be employed to impart luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the shapes, and highlights would be created with thick, textured patches of paint known as impastos.
Oil as a medium of painting is dated circa the 11th century. The method of easel painting with oil colours, however, resulted directly from 15th-century tempera-painting methods. Basic improvements in refining linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents from 1400 coincided with a need for mediums other than pure egg-yolk tempera, meeting the changing requirements of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). Originally, oil paints and varnishes had been employed to glaze tempera panelswhich had been painted from a usual linear draftsmanship. The technically vibrant, gem-like paintings from the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, for example, were finished with the new style.
Throughout the 16th century, oil paint became established as the ultimate painting material in Venice. By the 17th century, Venetian artists had grown proficient in exploiting the basic traits of oil painting, especially in applying many layers of glazes. Linen canvas, after a long period of development, overcame wood panelling as the most common support.
One 17th-century master of the oil technique was Velázquez, a Spanish painter in the Venetian tradition, whose remarkably economical but informative brushstrokes have frequently been emulated, notably in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens challenged tradition in the style in which he loaded light colours opaquely, in juxtaposition to thin, transparent darks and shadows. A third great 17th-century master of oil painting was the Dutch painter Rembrandt. In his art, a single brushstroke can effectively depict form; cumulative strokes create great textural depth, with a combination of the rough and the smooth, the thick and the thin. A system of loaded whites and transparent darks would be finally enhanced by glazing, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.
Other basic influences on the techniques of later easel painting are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight appearances. A great many admired works (e.g., like those from Johannes Vermeer) were crafted with smooth and graduated blends of tones to create subtly shadowed forms and delicate colour variations.
The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be achieved with traditional genres and/or techniques, however, and some abstract painters - as well as to some extent contemporary traditional style painters - have expressed a need for a plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be formed from oil paint and its conventional additives. Some want a larger variation of thick to thin applications and a speedier rate of drying. Some of them mixed coarsely grained materials with the colours to create textures, some artists use oil paints in heavier thicknesses than is usual, and a large part have turned to acrylic paints, because they are more versatile and dry faster.
Interested in oil painting? For art supplies Brisbane, including canvas art supplies and artists supplies, visit or call the Discount Art Warehouse.