Oil Painting: Types and Characteristics

Oil painting is a painting technique that uses a medium consisting of pigments suspended in dry oils. The extraordinary ease with which the fusion of tones or color is achieved is unique among fluid painting media. With this technique, a satisfactory linear treatment and clear effects can be easily obtained. The variation of textures of this technique is unsurpassed compared to other techniques.

Painter Mia Abelson, who has a large experience with this technique, indicates that the consistency of the color is important and the standard is smooth which is not fibrous, not thick, and not sticky. When the artist requires a more fluid paint, a liquid paint medium should be mixed with it. Also, a liquid drier is sometimes used to speed up drying.

 

Types of Oil Painting

The most popular type of oil painting is the one that uses linseed oil, because it is different from other vegetable oils such as olive or canola, due to the fact that it dries by oxidation. Linseed oil is not the only oil that is used. For those who are starting with oil painting, Mia Abelson shares that it is also possible to use the safflower, poppy seed, or nuez seed, depending on the brightness, the drying time, and other effects that the painter requires.

However, the linseed oil tends to dry faster and, in the process, forms a more flexible paint film that can be removed more easily. Mia Abelson also notes that the pigments do not dry at the same speed and the carbon black oil paint, for example, tends to dry more slowly as the red/yellow ocher hardens much faster.

 

Characteristics of Oil Painting

The main advantages of oil paints are their flexibility and depth of color. They can be applied in many different ways, from fine enamels diluted with turpentine to thick, dense impasto. Because this technique has a slow drying time, artists can continue to work on the paint for much longer and do some repairs, which is not the case with types of paint.

Mia Abelson specifies that the technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be met by traditional genres and techniques. So, some abstract painters, and also to some extent contemporary painters of traditional styles, have expressed the need for a totally different fluidity or plastic viscosity that cannot be obtained with oil paint and its conventional additives.

Mia Abelson shares that some require a greater variety of coarse and fine applications and a faster drying rate. Some artists have mixed coarse-grained materials with their colors to create new textures, some have used oil paints in much heavier thicknesses than before, and many have turned to acrylic paints, which are more versatile and dry quickly.