Oil is the most forgiving painting medium there is, because it stays wet long enough to change your mind. That is also its main demand on you: it needs a sequence, and getting the sequence wrong causes problems that show up months later. Here is a landscape from start to finish, and the rules that keep it sound.
What you need
Paints
A limited palette teaches you more than a large one, and mixes better. Six tubes will paint almost any landscape:
- Titanium white
- Cadmium yellow (or lemon yellow)
- Yellow ochre
- Alizarin crimson (or cadmium red)
- Ultramarine blue
- Burnt sienna
Note there is no green and no black. Mixed greens look far better than tube green, and a dark mixed from ultramarine and burnt sienna is richer than black and does not deaden everything it touches.
Oils and solvent
Two separate things doing opposite jobs, and this is worth getting straight.
Solvent — odorless mineral spirits, or turpentine — thins paint, makes it dry faster, and cleans brushes. Oil — linseed, stand oil, or safflower — makes paint flow, dry slower, and become more transparent for glazing.
None of these mix with water. Water-mixable oils are a separate product, made specifically so you can clean up without solvent, and they are a reasonable choice if ventilation is a problem.
Brushes
Hog bristle for most of the work — oil paint is stiff and soft brushes cannot move it. A starter set with a large flat, a couple of filberts, a medium round and a small detail brush covers everything here. Softer synthetic or sable brushes are for fine detail and blending.
Surface
Stretched canvas or canvas board, primed with acrylic gesso. Gesso-primed heavy watercolor paper is a genuinely good and much cheaper option for practice, and plenty of experienced painters prefer it.
Whatever you use, it must be primed. Raw canvas absorbs the oil out of the paint, which leaves a dull, weak film and rots the fibers over time.
The rest
A palette — glass or a sealed wooden one, scraped clean with a blade. Palette knives for mixing and for texture. An easel. Rags. Old clothes. And ventilation, which matters: solvents are genuinely unpleasant and best avoided in a closed room.
The one rule: fat over lean
Every layer must contain more oil than the one beneath it.
Oil paint dries by oxidizing from the surface down, and oilier paint stays flexible longer. A lean, fast-drying layer over a fat, slow-drying one will set hard while the paint underneath is still moving, and it will crack.
In practice: start with paint thinned by solvent, and progressively add more oil and less solvent as you build up. The last and thickest strokes carry the most oil. Follow that and the painting stays sound for a century.
Painting the landscape
1. Look before you paint
Decide what the picture is actually about. Most scenes have two or three things worth painting and a lot of surrounding material. Knowing which is which before you start is most of the difference between a painting that works and one that is merely accurate.
2. Tone the canvas
Wipe a thin wash of burnt sienna thinned with solvent over the whole surface and let it dry. It kills the white, ties the picture together, and gives you a mid-tone to judge everything against.
3. Sketch the big shapes
With thinned paint and a brush, or a pencil. Horizon line, the mass of the mountains, where the tree line sits, where the eye should land. No detail.
4. Block in from back to front
Landscapes are painted in depth order: sky first, then the distance, then the middle ground, then the foreground. Each layer overlaps the one behind it, which is how you get things sitting convincingly in front of each other.
Sky. Ultramarine and white at the top, warming and lightening toward the horizon — add a little alizarin and more white as you come down. Blend while wet with a clean dry brush. The sky is almost never one flat color.
Distant hills. Here is the thing most beginners get wrong: distant land is blue and pale, not gray or dark. Air scatters light, so the further away something is the more it takes on the color of the sky and the less contrast it holds. Mix ultramarine, white and a touch of alizarin for a soft blue-violet. Resist adding black.
Middle-ground trees. Now you need greens, and you mix them from yellow and blue — never from black and blue, which gives you a dull navy. Cadmium yellow with ultramarine makes a strong green; yellow ochre with ultramarine makes a muted, natural one that is usually closer to what you actually see. Darken with burnt sienna, not black.
Foreground. Warmer, darker, sharper, more contrast. Yellow ochre and cadmium yellow with a touch of blue for grass, and let the strokes follow the direction the grass grows.
5. Refine and build
Now work back over what is there, with thicker paint carrying more oil. Strengthen the darks, find the light, sharpen the few edges that matter and leave the rest soft. Distant edges stay soft; near ones can be crisp.
6. Highlights last
A few touches of near-white where the light genuinely strikes — the top of a cloud, the edge of a rock, light catching water. Sparingly. This is the stage at which most paintings are overdone.
7. Sign it, and wait
Oil is touch-dry in days to weeks depending on thickness. It is not fully cured for six months to a year, and it should not be varnished until it is.
Techniques worth knowing
Underpainting. Resolving the whole composition in a single thinned color before any real color goes on. It separates the value problem from the color problem, and it is the best cure for muddy painting.
Alla prima. Painting wet into wet and finishing in one session, with no drying between layers. It gives lively, direct results and is how most outdoor sketches are made. It is the opposite of layered painting, not a stage within it.
Glazing. A transparent layer of color, thinned with oil or a glazing medium, over a dry layer beneath. The light passes through and bounces back, which is why a glazed color has a depth that an opaque mix cannot match.
Scumbling. The opposite — a broken, semi-opaque lighter layer dragged over a dry darker one with a nearly dry brush, so the underlayer shows through in patches. Excellent for mist, cloud and weathered surfaces.
Impasto. Thick paint holding the mark of the brush or knife. It belongs in the final layers, both because of fat over lean and because it is the thing you want the eye to land on.
Sfumato. Leonardo's method — transitions so gradual there is no perceptible edge, built from many thin, translucent layers rather than by blending wet paint. Slow, and unmatched for atmosphere.
Cleaning up
Wipe as much paint from the brush as possible on a rag first. Rinse in solvent, wipe again, then wash with warm water and soap, working it into the base of the bristles. Reshape and dry flat.
Solvent-soaked rags can spontaneously combust as they oxidize. Spread them out to dry rather than balling them up, and dispose of them properly. Do not pour solvent down the drain — let the pigment settle out in a sealed jar and reuse the clear liquid on top.
Is oil the right medium for you?
In its favor: the long working time allows blending nothing else can match, colors are deep and luminous, and it is very forgiving of changes.
Against: solvents, smell, ventilation, cost, mess, and waiting months before you can varnish.
Acrylic gives you most of the visual range with none of the solvents, at the cost of drying almost too fast to blend. Our guide to layering acrylic paint covers how the sequence differs.
And if what you want is to practice brushwork and color without also solving composition, drawing and mixing all at once, a paint by numbers kit narrows the problem usefully. You can see the designs in the shop, or look through the customer gallery.
