Oil painting for beginners: paints, surfaces, brushes, mediums and solvent-free options

TUREFF• •0

Oil paint has a reputation for being difficult, messy and smelly. It does not have to be any of those. Its slow drying is actually the friendliest thing about it for a beginner: you can move paint around, blend and correct for hours, sometimes days. This guide covers what you actually need to start, and how to set up so that the smell and the solvents are under control from day one.

Paints: student or artist grade

Student grade paints are cheaper and usually use less pigment, sometimes with fillers. They are fine for learning to handle the medium.
Artist grade paints carry more pigment, so a little goes further and mixes stay brighter.
A sensible compromise is student grade for the colours you use most (especially white, which you will go through fastest) and a few artist-grade tubes where colour strength matters.
Water-mixable oils are real oil paints with a modified binder that can be thinned and cleaned up with water. They are a good option if you cannot ventilate well or simply want to avoid solvents.

A limited starter palette

You do not need twenty tubes. A warm and a cool version of each primary, plus white and an earth colour, will mix almost anything:

titanium white
a lemon or cool yellow and a warm yellow
a warm red and a cool, crimson-type red
ultramarine blue and a cooler blue
burnt umber or burnt sienna

Learning to mix from a small palette teaches you more about colour than buying every shade.

Surfaces

Canvas boards and canvas panels are cheap and ideal for practice studies.
Stretched canvas is what most people picture, and is sold already primed.
Wooden panels give a firmer surface and suit detailed work.
Oil painting paper is useful for quick sketches and colour tests.

Whatever you use must be primed (usually with gesso). Raw canvas or bare wood absorbs oil and, over time, the oil can damage the fibres.

Brushes and palette knives

Hog bristle brushes are stiff and push thick paint around well. Synthetic brushes are softer and good for smoother passages and details.
Start with a few shapes: a couple of flats or filberts in different sizes, a round for lines, and a small one for details.
A palette knife is useful for mixing on the palette and for scraping off mistakes, not just for knife painting.
For a palette, a sheet of glass with grey or white paper underneath, a wooden palette or a pad of tear-off palette paper all work.

Mediums and solvents

A medium changes how the paint behaves: thinner, glossier, faster or slower drying. A solvent thins paint and cleans brushes.

Traditional set-ups use a solvent such as odourless mineral spirits or turpentine to thin early layers and a drying oil such as linseed oil to make later layers richer.
Solvent-free painting is entirely possible: thin with a little oil or a solvent-free medium, wipe brushes on a rag, and clean them with oil and then soap and water.
Many beginners use paint straight from the tube for most of their work, and that is fine.

"Odourless" solvents have had the smell removed, not the vapour. They still evaporate into the air you breathe.

Ventilation and a sensible set-up

Paint near an open window, ideally with air moving through the room, especially if you use any solvent.
Keep solvent in a small closed jar rather than an open cup, and only pour out what you need.
Do not eat, drink or smoke while painting, and wash your hands when you finish.
Keep rags that have oil on them away from heat, and deal with them safely at the end of each session (see the safety guide in this room).

Your first sessions

Paint a value scale from white to dark using one colour and white.
Mix a colour chart: each colour on your palette mixed with each other colour and with white.
Paint a simple object, such as a mug or an apple, under one light.

What did you buy for your first set, or what are you unsure about? Ask in the comments below.