Oil painting has been around for hundreds of years. It has been practiced by so many artists, and they have produced a lot of excellent pieces of art because of it. The artists have developed so many techniques to further the development of oil paintings. One of them is by making canvas oil paintings. This is oil painting done on a canvas, the most popular support for painting.
Canvas oil paintings require skills. Not only does the painting involve a careful study of the subject, color and composition, but the artist should also consider the medium and the surface he is painting on. In this case, the medium is oil and the surface is canvas.
To start an oil painting on canvas, the artist would usually sketch the outline of the subject on the surface, which is canvas in this case. Then the paints are usually mixed with a medium or any solvent that would dictate how the fast the paint would dry. The usual solvent for this is linseed oil, although there are various oils out there that can be used such as safflower oil, cold wax and resins. These media can alter the paint’s properties such as translucency, body and gloss. Then you apply the paint. The general rule when painting with oil is: fat over lean. This means that every additional layer of paint should contain more oil than the layer down below. This would ensure proper drying of the paint, and lesser cracks would occur.
Paintbrushes are usually used to paint the figures on the canvas. That is the traditional method. There are various ways to transfer paint onto the surface: you can use palette knives, rags and even your fingers. Since the oil paints take so long to dry, the artist can actually alter the painting even if it has already been painted long before. Sometimes, the artist can even remove a layer of paint and redo everything just with a rag and turpentine. This is true when the paint is still wet; but when it is dry, the paint should be scraped.
It should be noted that artists are very keen on the kind of brushes they use on their oil paintings. There are various kinds of paint brushes, usually dependent on the material of the paint brush and the shape of the paint brush. Paint brushes made of hog hair are usually used for those needing bold strokes. Mongoose hair brushes are soft and can be used for small details. The most expensive kind of paint brush, however, is the one made of Siberian mink tail hair called Kolinsky sable because it has a superfine point and a good memory or “snap”.
Canvas oil paintings usually dry in two weeks. Unlike water based paints, oil paints dry by oxidation and not by evaporation. If it needs to be varnished, it is supposedly ready in six months; but to be sure, do that after one year. People in the art industry do not even consider an oil painting dry even after twenty years. They consider it dry after sixty to eighty years.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 9th, 2011 at 3:07 am. It is filed under ART ARTICLES and tagged with canvas oil paintings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
