Hi Chris. Oil paints are generally not water soluble. Ranges of water soluble oils have recently become available, but I haven't tried them. It seems slightly gimmicky and more for parents who don't want their children handling dangerous liquids than anything else. Oil paints are made by mixing pigment with linseed oil. Linseed oil has a gloopy translucency which is responsible for the luminescence that has made oils so beloved of painters over the centuries. More linseed oil can be added to the paint to increase the lustre and also smooth out brushstrokes.
Turpentine is a better thinner for oils but much more expensive than white spirit. White spirit dulls pigment as it dries but you can combat this by adding approx 1 part linseed (stand) oil to 10 parts white spirit. Of course that gives you a bit of extra shininess which you may not want.
The nearest water based equivalent is acrylics, if you've used them. Visually the main difference is that acrylics have that surface plastickyness going on, oils have greater depth to the colours - you can build up hues and tones by layering in a way that is difficult to do with acrylics. Of course you can paint with acrylics and have the result look like oils and vice versa, and there are vast ranges of mediums available for both types of paint to affect the way they behave.
Oils also dry way slower than acrylics, depending on how thickly you've painted you can wait days, weeks, months... apparently the Van Gogh "Sunflowers" in the National Gallery (London) has to be hung upside down 6 months a year because it's not dried through yet and the image would slip slightly. Again, you can buy all sorts of goop to affect this, in fact you can buy mediums to get oil paints to behave pretty much however you'd like. The mediums available for acrylics seem to be geared toward more overtly decorative effects.
For a starter kit I'd recommend the Lukas Studio range, they're sold as "student quality" and are slightly more expensive than the basic ranges (Daler-Rowney Georgian and Windsor & Newton Winton) but are good value. Depending on what sort of painting you'll be doing it can be worth shelling out for more expensive paints (Michael Harding or Old Holland), particularly if you want more unnatural pigments like a bright grass green or violet. They may cost five times the amount but the pigment is much stronger and it'll probably last five times as long. If you want to cake it on though, stick to the inexpensive stuff.
Hog's hair brushes are the traditional standard issue. Personally I prefer synthetics - smoother surface.
General materials fetishism thread here. |
