General good practice for anyone who wants to paint in oils…

1. Good equipment – Save up or splash out on a couple of decent brushes and a few good quality paints (suggested colours below) you can expand slowly, you don't need to be rich to start painting.

2. A good cleaning regime – Keep your brushes and pallet clean, no point ruining your good brushes by leaving them covered in paint or festering in the jar of turpentine. Clean them as soon as you are done for the day with warm water and soap until the water runs clear, leave them to dry naturally.

If you want a quick and easy way to keep your pallet clean ~Leebea suggested to me “I wrap the pallet in foil and then mix my oils on the foil, then when I'm done rip it off and throw It away. The pallet always stays clean.” I think it’s a great tip.

3. The book: The Artists Handbook by Ray Smith will take you through everything you wanted to ask about oil painting and more. I find it an invaluable reference.

4. Life drawing skills are very important for anyone wishing to paint ‘realistically’! I cannot stress enough how much this will improve your ability to paint and draw with accuracy. Take a life drawing class as often as you can to keep improving your skills.

Your pallet


The pallet you use is as personal as a fingerprint, will develop as you do and also depends on what you like to paint. But if you wish to paint figuratively, and have no idea what colours to choose a good starting point would be to buy:

Titanium white
Lemon yellow
Scarlet lake
Burnt sienna
Burnt umber
Paynes grey
Thalocyanide green
Raw Sienna
Cadmium yellow deep
Flesh tint

These colours are ones I use in my paintings that have skin tones. I avoid buying black because it is such a flat colour. You can create much better dark tones from mixing or glazing two opposing colours, for example a rich blue and a dark brown.



Buying paint


On a tube of paint you will see the name of the colour written, if it has the word ‘hue’ at the end this means it is an artificial pigment, and the colour will not go as ‘far’ as a natural one.

I will try to explain; think of the strength of colour in a pigment like the strength of taste in a hot chilli. Some hot chilli’s are tiny, only a couple of cm long and yet the tiniest bit of this chilli in a meal will make the whole thing very, very hot to taste. The flavour goes a long way with a small amount. In the same way, pigments in oil paint have many different strengths. Blue pigment, for example is very easy to find in nature, making it cheap for paint companies to use, therefore even student-grade oil paints have natural blue pigment in. A tiny dot of this blue mixed with other oils will go a long way, But other colours, like some reds are much harder to find in nature, so the oil paint companies make an artificial pigment called a ‘hue’ they put this ‘hue’ in their cheaper paints. A 'hue' is not strong at all so you have to use a lot of it to get a good strong colour on your canvas.

When buying paints you will find them priced according to their ‘series’, paints range over 5 or 6 series depending on the brand. The cheap series 1-2 paints will have many more hues in than the expensive ones. Don’t go buying all grade 5-6 paints, that’s a waste of money, but I do recommend you buy one or two of the more expensive paints, colours you use a lot or perhaps that are important to a particular painting you are working on. It's amazing the difference it can make to your work.



_{NB There are many different ways of painting in Oils, this is my way and my way is mostly traditional. This advice is not set in stone; in fact I encourage any artist - however well established - to regularly experiment with new ways of working. I write this article so that I can help those who are confused by oils or by painting figures, and it is also for people who want to know how another artist works.}


If anyone has questions relating to oil painting, please note me and I will try to include the answer it in one of my articles.