Because oil paints have been used for many centuries, their properties are very well known. Over the last 500 years artists have tried and done just about anything with oils. Only technological advances may produce further development of the oil painting techniques. In the following we will discuss some of the many advantages associated with the oil medium.

Oil is, even today, still one of the easiest and most forgiving mediums you can work in. Creating an oil painting is in fact relatively easy compared to other mediums such as watercolor or even pastels.

The advantages of oil are many and various. Here are some of the most important ones:

* Oil paints are easily put onto a canvas or panel. You just put some paint on your brush and rub it on the canvas or panel. The paint will generally not run or move.

* Creating a painting becomes a matter of putting the right color paint in the right place. Of course, some artists are better at this than others. In other words, this is easier said than done.

* One great property of oil paints is that they do not change color when they dry as opposed, for example, to acrylics. Oils pretty much stay the same for a long period of time.

* It is very easy to correct a mistake when you paint with oils. Just scrape the paint off with a paint knife and repaint whatever it was you scraped off.

* Oil paint dries very slowly because they consist of small pigment particles suspended in oil.
In fact, each color has its own drying time. But all paints dry slow enough so that you can remove them days and even weeks after they were applied. This is also the reason why it is so easy to correct mistakes.

Of course, the disadvantage is that they dry … slowly. That means they stay wet longer although there exist mediums that, when mixed in with the paint, can significantly speed up the drying process if that is what you want.

* It is easy to mix tube colors on a palette and is usually done with a brush of paint knife. There are mediums to thicken the paint into a pasta-like consistency and mediums to thin the paint into a water-like consistency.

* Once a color mixture formula is memorized it is easy to consistently reproduce the mixture. This is less the case with most other mediums.

* The fact that oil paint dries so slowly also gives you more time to work and rework a painting. You have enough time to sleep on certain decisions you need to make. Acrylics, for example, dry much faster and give you less time to ponder your masterpiece before action is required.

* Oil paints are also easily blended. So, it becomes relatively easy to render smooth transitional areas between different colors or values.

* Oils are also amenable to a whole series of techniques each of which yields a different look and feel. One example of such a technique is glazing. In de glazing technique several thin layers of transparent paint are put on top of each other. Each layer must be thoroughly dry before the next one is applied. Once done light is reflected off each layer resulting into an unusual luminosity and brightness.

* Oil can be used on any number of grounds: canvas, panel canvas, glass, wood, paper, etc. each, when done correctly, with excellent and durable results.

These are some of the more important and interesting properties of oil paints that have given this medium the enduring popularity that it has. The idea now is that you try out the oils and see for yourself what sort of marvelous medium they really are. There are all sorts of brands on the market and there are even fairly inexpensive beginner sets that you can buy in just about any art supply store including those on the Internet.

About the Author

Remi Engels, Ph.D., is a pencil portrait artist and oil painter.