Oil Color Sets | Artists Oil Paint

How to Paint with Oil Color Sets & Artist's Oil Paint

Since 15th century artists oil colors developed to the most sophisticated art material in fine art paintings. Luminosity and brightness of artists oil paint raise oil paintings into the "royal class" among fine arts. Over centuries these paintings keep their oil colors character. Not varnished paintings as well as a few mixtures of varnish can darken the artwork. Many painters enjoy the typical smell of oil colors and they appreciate the very slow process of drying oil paint. This provides the possibility the adjust or change oil colors for several following days - a much more flexible art material than acrylic paint.
 

If you want to paint with oil colors while you are traveling, it's a good advice to have a look for a oil color set as you can find it at specialized art suppliers. Such sets provide paint tubes, art tools, brushes and putty knives in one handy box.

An artists paint set offers the great opportunity to to learn painting with oil colors.

It is easy by buying additional color tones to complete your individual color chart.

 
Common oil color sets come with 6, 12, 24 or 48 paint tubes. In these days, the industrial production of professional artist colors produces high quality paint after recipes from old masters and reach a very intense brightness and luminosity of color fidelity. Original oil colors had been a mix of natural resin.

In former times, just a few artist brought thick, pure paint directly on canvas. Most others mixed the paint from the tubes with an oily expedient. Most common art materials to mix with oil colors were linseed oil in combination with turpentine. Until today, artists use these techniques. But it's also possible to use walnut-oil, poppy-seed oil, hemp-oil, wood-oil, or sun-flower oil. The more you mix your paint with an oily expedient, the more you can create glazy layers and transparent colors. Linseed oil also slows down the drying of artists oil colors enormously.
 

The whole process of drying till complete dryness and hardening of artists oil colors may last up to one year. That's the moment when professional artists seal their oil paintings with the final varnish. This protects the oil colors, especially thick painted artworks, from not getting cracked.

The most common ground for artists oil colors are pre-stretched canvas, wood, or hardboard panels prepared with primer materials. Prepared with a non-permeable primer you can also use cardboard as base for your study. To provide a traditional, professional primer for your oil painting you have to prepare the ground during a long process by putting numerous thin layers of chalk primer or half-chalk primer on the canvas panel (according on how absorbent you need your ground to be). Less time and pains takes a primer with tempera. Specialized art suppliers offer prepared canvas panels in various standard sizes and with several primers. If you start painting directly on canvas without any primer, you will realize very soon, that the canvas sucks most of the oil and turpentine and that your oil colors show much less luminosity and brightness.

Oil color sets normally come with a set of oil brushes in several standard sizes and putty knives. Brushes for oil colors have to be must stronger than those fine, soft brushes for water colors.
 

In most situations a flat oil brush is much better for painting with oil colors than a round brush. To mix different colors you can buy a wooden artist palette. Of course any ordinary wood or plastic plate can be used, too. Right after you've finished painting, you can clean the oil paint from your art materials with just a cloth and some curd soap in lukewarm water. After a long time you can only clean dried oil paint from your art materials with turpentine, petrol or nitro thinner.