Six Oil Painting Tips and Techniques That You Need to Know
Oil paints are one of the easier mediums to apply. Hence, learning painting and exploring this art form using oil paints is highly recommended. However, beginners may be presented with the biggest question: where to start?
To answer this and aid you in starting your journey without feeling overwhelmed, we have come up with these few tips and techniques that are essential for beginners.
Hold Your Paint Brush Correctly
Even though there are various ways of holding a brush to gain the desired effect in one’s painting, there’s one go-to method that painters refer to in order to achieve optimal fluidity and sensitivity in the strokes. For this, you must hold the brush handle as far back as possible, thereby gaining the highest degree of control. It may seem uncomfortable at first, but it allows you to paint using your whole arm instead of simply your wrists.
Master Brush Orientation
When painting, one must remember that the brush has two sides (also known as orientations). These two orientations provide writers with a wide array of opportunities to experiment with painting. The painter can not only paint wider strokes but also use the same brush with its other side to paint sharper strokes and lines to enhance the painting.
Variance in Pressure
The application of pressure can greatly influence the end result of a painting. Hence, experimenting with a variety of pressure points can help in figuring out what works best. We advise being light-handed with your paintbrush. Many times, the pressure applied in the stroke can make a painting go from being a masterpiece to an amateur’s work. Hence, developing that sense of pressure can aid in producing cleaner and better paintings.
Don’t Over Mix
When you mix your colors, you must never overdo it, because when you mix the two colors and they come in contact with one another, there are several inconsistencies in the mixture which add a vivid perspective to your painting and give it an interesting quality. Overdoing the same can make the color flat and leave the painting a mess!
Wet on Wet vs. Wet on Dry
Experimenting with wet and dry surfaces provides a huge difference in the result. The reason is simple: wet surfaces ensure better blending of the paints and are useful to achieve gradient effects and smoother transitions. However, to gain better textures and striking details, painting on dry surfaces is much more preferable.
As you start experimenting more, the intricacies of working with semi-wet and semi-dry surfaces will become clearer, thereby opening the gates to many other styles of using the medium of oil paint.
The style of a painter can be as conceptually complex as the subject of the painting. Thus, it is important to stay true to your skill and use your own imagination. However, for beginners, the aforementioned oil painting tips are especially critical as they enable new artists to make minute changes to ensure drastic results.