Oil painting Brushes: What Do You Need To Start?

Oil painting technique was born when the Flemish painting technique was imported to Italy. Oil colors were prepared in the boutiques with extremely patient work. The ingredients were earth, animal, and vegetable extracts. To keep it all together there was oil: linseed, walnut, and poppy oil were mostly used. Today it is not necessary to prepare colors at home: manufacturing companies such as Maimeri, Rembrandt, and Winsor & Newton allow us to buy oil colors in bulk or sets. The first one is perfect for professional painters, who prefer a single gradation of color, the second one is mostly used by students, who need a specific range of nuances. In addition to the colors, you need the right supports: the most used painting support is the canvas. It is typically made of linen, cotton, or polyester. In the absence of canvas, a good substitute is  paper for oil painting, a unique kind of paper featured a special barrier that absorbs mediums while allowing the paint to remain on the surface. “…oil painting colors were prepared in the boutiques with extremely patient work…”

Oil painting brushes: which to use

To paint with oil brushes you need more than one brush. To be able to recreate all the desired effects in painting, it is necessary to have brushes of different shapes and sizes. In principle, you can use both marten hairbrushes and bristle brushes, as well as synthetic brushes. The good thing about oil painting brushes is that unlike other techniques such as watercolour, you do not need expensive brushes to get started. Many artists, including Scott Waddell for example, use basic quality brushes, which are also inexpensive to replace. The use of ox hair brushes, on the other hand, is excluded, as they are well suited for painting with tempera, acrylics, and watercolors. A distinctive feature of oil painting brushes is the use of special auxiliary products, which must be diluted with colors to increase the expressive capacity of the individual pigments. In a painter’s studio can be identified as mediums the canonical oils of linseed, or walnut, or poppy, as well as the essence of turpentine. In this case, we are talking about classic oils, which should be used following the equally classic rule of painting alternating fat over the lean level of color. The first layer of color is diluted with turpentine, the second layer is a little “fat” because you need to add more oil to the color, so you can move on to the other layers, alternating this concept. In addition to the base oils, there are many types of medium, different from case to case. Some of them, are used to give more brilliance, others to increase the fluidity of the color, others to have a more opaque result. The world of chemistry, therefore, helps the most experienced painters in many ways. If you like this article, I recommend you also to read this other interesting one: “Oil painting basics – Professional suggestions to improve faster”