Adventures in Oil Painting

Happy new year! It's been three months since I picked up a watercolor brush, and that's not due to a lack of painting - I've been learning how to paint in oils over the last few months! I took a stab at learning oils in 2023 but it didn't really jive with me until now.

I returned to work from maternity leave in October, and quickly realized how precious my time is on the weekends with my daughter, and how hard it is to cram in chores and things like painting during nap time. When you only have 30 mins, or maybe an hour an a half if you're lucky, you need flexibility with time, which is why the idea of learning to paint in oils appealed to me.  The drying time is the complete opposite of watercolor - if she wakes up from a nap while I'm painting in oils, it's easy to drop everything and come back to it later to keep working versus potentially being at a critical moment with paper that's starting to dry with watercolor when she wakes up from a nap.  Once the paper dries, there's no going back!

It's been a fun brain-teaser learning oil painting: it's all backwards from watercolor, which is the way I learned how to paint.  In watercolor, you paint light to dark, but in oil painting, you paint dark to light.  With watercolor, your paint pretty much stays in place when you apply it to the paper and it dries, but with oil, there's a whole "push and pull" of the paint throughout the entire painting process where it feels like you're almost sculpting the paint. And when painting in layers with oil, you need to paint thin to thick, otherwise you end up lifting paint and the colors can get muddy. 

I found a lot of great resources online, books at the library, and an instructor whose teaching method I like, and have been learning a lot from lessons that I try out on the weekends. His philosophy is all about painting small - the more "reps" you can get in with working a painting from start to finish, the better you'll get faster because you're completing more paintings.  If you're working on a giant painting that's going to take you two weeks to complete, you won't get the hang of the process as quickly because you won't be painting complete paintings as much.  Since October, I've painted about fourteen oil paintings so far, ranging from landscapes (my fave) to portraits (so hard!) to still lifes (a valuable learning tool).  Sizes vary from 6x6 to 11x14, with 9x12 linen panels being my preferred size and surface on which to paint.

I'm trying to paint as safely as possible, too, with a baby in the house.  I realized that you don't need to paint with solvents after reading "The New Oil Painting," and I use a combination of water-mixable oil paints to tone my canvas and get my sketch in (the paint is thinned with water!) and regular oil paints for the balance of my painting.  My brushes are cleaned with walnut oil and wiping off on a paper towel, and then using my brush soap and water as needed to get any leftover pigment out. I also wear gloves to keep any paint pigments from getting on my skin, and use pigments that are free of toxic materials like cadmiums.

I feel like I'm at the point now where I can try branching out on my own and trying my hand at my own original oil paintings. But believe it or not, I actually need to get back to watercolor for a bit! I'm taking a workshop at the end of January in Boston and need to make sure I still remember how to use the medium, hah.