From the article: Top 10 Oil Painting Tips for Beginners
What tips do you have for someone learning to paint with oils? What do you wish you'd know when you first started oil painting? Share your favorite oil painting tips with us here. Your Oil Painting Tips
Avoiding Muddy Turpentine
- Cut the mesh form a sieve similar in size to the bottom of your turpentine jar. Drop it in so that the brushes rest and brush on the sieve where turps is still clear instead of agitating muddy paint residue at the bottom.
- —Guest Bridge
Buy the best...
- ...oil paints you can afford. Don't be stingy laying out the paint on the palette. Scrape off areas that don't work and do over. Use a drying medium. Don't worry about getting paint on your person or clothes. Stretch your own canvas or cut your own hardwood...you fit the canvas to the composition, not the other way around. Take lessons and enhance your knowledge of oil painting. Use a large glass palette. Rotate your mineral spirits...it'll go further. Clean your brushes regularly. Clean your palette after each session...much harder to scrape off paint after it dried. The beauty of oil paint is that you can always change it if it doesn't work...don't be scared of it. For those who have a problem with the odors, ventilate.
- —rghirardi
Have More Than One on the Go
- I wish someone had told me early on in my oil painting "career" that it is a good idea to NOT work on only one painting. When you prepare one canvas for a painting -- do three. Have three drawings loosely sketched on three canvases. Loosely block in all three. Then decide to give a go to the one that interests you most right away. When you hit a point (maybe several painting days from then) that you need to leave an area to dry, let a passage 'percolate' a bit, do some heavy thinking -- that is the time to set it aside for a while. If you don't have another canvas 'ready-to-go' I find that I overwork a passage, or don't do enough thinking about how to solve a problem, put too much paint on -- whatever -- all because I still wanted to continue painting. Leave #1 for a while and come back to it later with a fresh 'eye' approach. If I can't solve the problem just yet and I can enjoy getting into project #2 (or #3). My time at the easel has increased with better results as I am ready to go!
- —stillpainting
Be Patient!
- The slow drying of oil paint is both a joy and a curse. Do not be tempted into overworking and overworking an area because you still can. Move onto another painting if need be.
- —Guest Josie
