Oil painting RAGE - PLEASE HELP ME!

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I am an artist. I love to draw and a few years back I started painting. I only used watercolors for ages and I love them. Then someone introduced me to acrylics recently and while they have their advantages, I prefer watercolors for their changeability. The acrylic just dries SO FAST that there's no time to make changes - watercolors can be modified pretty much forever. Anyway, I wanted to try oils for ages because they seem to act more like acrylic than watercolor, except they dry slowly and can be modified and mixed before they dry.

I finally got a cheap set of paints and a big jug of paint thinner. I grabbed some brushes from my local art store (middle-of-the-road oil painting brushes, hardly cheap but not expensive either) and excitedly sat down with a small canvas to try things out.

I was massively disappointed. Oils do NOT act like acrylic. The paints are clumpy and don't move around well. I tried adding some paint thinner (just a tiny bit to thin it, as an artist friend recommended to me) and they got thinner but still had big clumps in them and yet the thin parts were too thin to work with properly. I couldn't get them even. I couldn't "draw" anything with the brush the way I can with acrylics and watercolors, because the paint didn't come out evenly and the brushes felt strange, more suited to big imprecise stuff than details. I didn't like how the brushes felt so I switched to my acrylic brushes. It was a bit better, but not much.

The biggest problem is trying to clean the brushes. When I put the dirty brush (even if it has only a little paint on it) into the paint thinner, the thinner immediately becomes very thin paint. The brush is NOT clean, no matter how much thinner I use. I have to wipe and scrub the brush on an old rag to try to get the last of the paint out, and every brush I dip into the thinner takes on a new gray shade, which it then transfers to the paint.

I thought maybe I was making a mistake by trying to use my normal painting methods with this new type of paint, so I flipped on an episode of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross (which I regularly watch just for relaxation and self-esteem boosting purposes) and tried to follow along. I made some very thin white paint and coated the canvas, and tried to follow the episode. It started off well: the sky looked nice, and the hills in the background were pretty even though my colors and tools don't exactly match Bob's. The trouble started when I put in my first "shadow" - in this case, for the grass. The shadow went on fine, very very thin but visible, but when I tried to put a lighter color over it as a "highlight" it wouldn't work. It just mixed in with the dark color to create a new, uglier dark color. I hear Bob's voice telling me "if you're having trouble getting your paint to stick, just thin it out a bit with a little paint thinner, because a thin paint will stick to a thin paint." I tried adding the tiniest amount of paint thinner to the paint, and going back to put the lighter color on the top, but it just made a thinner brownish-grayish sludge immediately. I wasn't "overmixing" or anything - this was IMMEDIATE. One touch and the brush was gray.

I tried to hold it together and just keep going, but it got worse and worse as I went along. The trees are brownish-gray lumps and the water at the bottom looks like a tar pit with reddish shadows in it here and there. Finally I realized that if I didn't stop, I was going to throw this thing across the room.

What the hell am I doing wrong? Bob dips his brushes in paint thinner, bangs it against the easel, and comes up with a brush that looks brand new. I touch the paint with the brush, try to wash it off in the thinner, shake it off, squeeze it into a rag, scrub it into the rag trying to get the last of the color out, and they look dark gray and ragged and useless. I'm so frustrated I'm nearly in tears.

So can anyone with oil painting experience please help me out here? Why can't I get the damned brushes clean? Why does the paint mix immediately instead of layering like I see other painters doing? Why is my canvas an ugly mash of brown and gray? Someone PLEASE help me. Do I have bad paints? Bad paint thinner? Have I missed something critical? Because I'm certain that it shouldn't be like this.

Now I do not paint and never have, but I do know a tiny bit about painting. One thing I know is that oil painting is probably the hardest type to do. It takes a long time and you have to use special techniques with it. I know many artists train for years in oil painting. All my friends that pain only use oil on special occasions because they have so much trouble working with it. But a nice oil painting looks amazing, its by far my favorite in terms of the end product!

Oilpainting is an art that takes a long time to learn properly. Bob Ross makes it look easier than it is. Don't forget he had years of practice before he started making the series. It'll take time and lots of practice before you can handle oilpaints well.

I suspect your problems with cleaning the brushes and lumpy paints are caused by a poor quality oil paint. Oil paints are made of pigments ground up with linseed oil (usually) and a bit of thinner. The quality of the oil paint depends on the ratio of pigment and oil, as well as how finely the pigments are ground. Cheap oil paints have a lot of oil in them, and the pigments aren't finely ground. This can lead to the problems you mention: brushes are difficult to clean (it's the oil that makes it so), and the paint is lumpy and doesn't flow well.

The probem with the highlights is another one that has to do with oil painting technique. If you want crisp highlights without mixing of the colour underneath, you must let the painting dry for at least 24 hours. This is the minimum time for artist quality paints. Cheap paints take a lot longer to gel (= dry enough to paint over it without mixing). It may take a week or more. You can make it dry a little faster by adding a tiny bit of oil drying agent or a touch of cobalt blue (natural oil drying agent).

Get yourself a book about oilpainting, or visit an artist forum like WetCanvas. There are several techniques in oilpainting you need to know about. You appear to be wanting to paint "alla prima" (making the painting in one sitting), but this is a technique that isn't as easy as it sounds. Most oilpaintings are made in layers, with drying time of a day or more between each layer. This properity of oilpaint is why oilpainters like oil paint. You can correct mistakes fairly easily because the paint takes a long time to gel. If that is not your cup of tea, you might want to have a look at watersoluble oilpaints (dry faster than regular oil and can be mixed with water instead of the dangerous thinner) or stick with acrylic. You can also mix a little oil with acrylic to extend the drying time. Lots of possibilities, lots to learn.

Thanks for the comprehensive answer, NewDawn. Perhaps cheap paints are my problem. But if it's true that you have to let it dry before adding a highlight color on the top, how does Bob Ross do it immediately without any problems? It must be possible.

I'm torn now. I really don't like using acrylic paints. I like how the paint looks once it dries, but I can't ever get them to do what I want. I don't like how they feel while I'm using them. I like how watercolors feel, but they are very limited. Once a color is down, you can mix it, but you can't ever just go over it with, say, a lighter color, or it'll just vanish the same way it did with the oil paints. And I have a hard time getting anything really opaque with watercolors.

I've already sunk quite a bit of money into this oil painting experiment and so far I absolutely hate it. But when I tell other artists I paint with watercolor and acrylic but not oil, they give me this look of absolute contempt, like that makes me an amateur. I feel like I must be missing something really important or useful.

My artistic style in general is very haphazard and tends towards the abstract. I do not plan what I'm going to do, I just start and work with what happens. My best medium is colored pencils or marker on paper. I always know exactly what the tools will do and what colors and lines they will produce. Watercolor painting is somewhat less predictable, acrylic even less so, and oils just feel totally random and frustrating. I know they say practice makes perfect, but I don't know how much time I can dedicate to practicing with this when I have so much else to do. But at the same time, I'm not completely satisfied with the tools I have now and I want to find new ways of expressing the things I'm trying to put down on paper or canvas.

I'm one of those people for whom most things have always come easily (aside from social skills and the like, of course). I never had to try hard in school and when someone teaches me a skill, I usually pick it up immediately and before they know it, I'm the one teaching them. On the other hand, when something is hard, I tend to give up immediately because I've never had to put that much work into something before. Maybe it's time for me to learn something difficult for a change. But I have to learn to keep the frustration under control somehow. Oil paints and paint thinner are one thing I can't just chuck across the room when I'm angry!

I primarily work in acrylics, so I don't think I can add very much to this advice, save for a few points:

First of all, I believe it should be noted that while mixing oil and acrylic can be done, one should proceed with caution and experiment a little with this technique first before using it on anything that is supposed to last a while. Acrylics are water-based paints. If you remember anything about viscosity of fluids from elementary science class, it shouldn't be all that difficult to figure out what sort of issues can arise from mixing paints based in oil and water. Under most circumstances, if you're ever going to use the two different types together, the best way to go about it is layering the oil paint on top of an acrylic underpainting, and not the other way around. Otherwise, your painting could be prone to cracking and peeling later on down the road.

If I may, I would also like to add my two cents about the acrylic alternative. There are three primary reasons I prefer to work in acrylics over oils. I mention them, because these are also all things to consider when working with oils:

First of all, there's the method of cleaning up. As mentioned, with oil paint, one will need turpentine, mineral spirits, and/or paint thinner; acrylics require only water, which I personally find much easier and nicer (plus, those chemicals also require a very particular kind of disposal).

Secondly, so long as we're on the topic of chemicals, safety is also another genuine concern for any artist. If you're going to use oils, please please do yourself a favor and make sure your working space is properly ventilated. One of my chief concerns, and one of the reasons I don't use oils, is safety; I sadly don't have enough income to be able to afford a studio (space in Vancouver is ludicrously expensive), so my apartment must suffice-- and I simply don't have the means to ensure that my apartment will be ventilated sufficiently when working with fuming chemicals.

Finally, there's my third reason, which is precisely because of the speed with which acrylics dry. Some artists value oils because they dry slowly, and it's easy to change mistakes in the moment. However, as an artist, I'm sort of impatient, and I like seeing dry results at a faster pace. The technique which is most comfortable to me uses the quickness of acrylics to my advantage. If I make a mistake or decide I want to try something else, I correct it on the next application. I may not be able to get the painting 100% right on the first pass, but it only takes me a few minutes before I get another shot at reworking it, and most of the time, I find that the opacity of acrylic paint is more than sufficient to allow for pentimienti on a one-pass rapid basis.

EDIT: This was posted as I was writing my original post:


I know what you mean. Quite a few of my fine artist colleagues also have the idea that oil is where it's at, and nothing else will suffice. But you shouldn't let others' preferences dictate to you, or make you think that other mediums aren't equally valid. Plenty of established fine arts work primarily in acrylics or watercolors.

Bob Ross created his own line of paints that are essential to his wet-in-wet technique. It won't work with regular oilpaint, regardless of the quality. You'll get exactly what you got: muddy colours.

It's possible to make the painting in one sitting with highlights and all if you use the Alla Prima technique. It's quite different from the blended Bob Ross technique. Masters of this technique were painters like Frans Hals, John Singer Sargent and Vincent van Gogh.
It is somewhat like 'paint by numbers', so you have to plan beforehand where the colours are going to be. Instead of layering the paint, colours are laid next to each other with one brushstroke, so they only blend a little at the edges. You can see the difference if you compare the layered technique of a painter like Bartholomeus van der Helst with the Alla Prima technique of Frans Hals.

http://www.kam.illinois.edu/collection/ ... lore1.html

(scroll to the bottom of the page)



No, you're not missing anything. Some artists are snobs and try to tell you that you're not a 'real artist' if you can't work in oil. Nonsense. There's no point in using a medium you don't like; you'll only hate it more. But since you've already got the paints, why not experiment with them to see what they do? Just paint without wanting to make a 'picture' and see what happens.



You'd be surprised to learn how many of the great masters have done exactly that! Van Gogh was notorious for it, which is probably why everybody ran away screaming. One of his lady friends did so because 'the whole house is covered in paint. There's even paint in the cooking pots!' (lol!)

Yes, you are right, but there are ways to work around it to prevent cracking. Watersoluable oils mix well with acrylic without cracking. The same can be done with regular oils by adding an emulsifier like lecitin or simply egg yolk.

AHA! I KNEW there had to be something I was missing. That makes me feel a LOT better. It would be nice if he had mentioned somewhere along the line that his technique will only work with his special paints. I've been watching that show for years and while I knew he sold paints, I didn't know they were essential to his method.

I didn't realize Van Gogh painted that way. He's by far my favorite artist of all time so naturally I imagine, especially given his reputation, that he was like me - haphazard and unplanned in all his work. It's somewhat discouraging to hear that I couldn't paint "like him" without planning the painting beforehand, because I simply cannot work that way. It's not that I want to copy his style, just... I guess I had a different idea in mind and it's disappointing to have it feel dismantled.

I certainly won't throw away my paints and I don't want to give up just yet, but I need to solve the basic problem of how to clean the brushes. Right now it's pretty much impossible and it's stopping me from being able to paint anything that isn't gray. And I like bright colors, so gray is not making me happy right now!

Thanks for all the feedback guys. You're being very helpful, really.

Have you tried cleaning them with liquid soap as a last step? It may be that the paint has gelled in your brushes, in which case you need to soak them in thinner for a few hours to get the paint liquid again. Then push out as much paint as you can with a rag or a newpaper. Then take some liquid soap and scrub the brush in it until the soap begins to foam. If all is well, you should see the gray coming out. When the soap gets too saturated with colour, take some new soap. Repeat until the soap doesn't change colour anymore. Then rinse out the brush well and dry with a rag or newspaper.

The minute I bought drying agent, my life got easier with adding highlights.

I'm still not great at oil painting but I have fun. Which reminds me that I need to get more paint thinner.

This has happened to me before too, and this method works.

All that is well and good for cleaning them well once, but when I'm actually painting I can't clean the brushes between colors, unless I want to do the whole soap thing after each stroke. Is it possible I just have poor paint thinner? I got the only odorless thinner I could find. I got it from a hardware store rather than an art store because the only art store I know of around here isn't open during times I'm not working and the hardware store was much cheaper anyway. People have told me it shouldn't matter... I've got a slight extra difficulty because the label is entirely in Czech, which I don't speak well. I'm confident that the main label says odorless paint thinner, and it was in the same area as the normal stinky thinners and turpentine and all that, so it should be fine, right? Will it help to just use more of it? It's really very frustrating. Thanks!

EDIT: I just checked my painting from 2 days ago and it's still *completely* wet. So I guess maybe cheap paints is really the main problem, too much oil like you said. I will have to see if I can find a drying agent at the local art shop - leave work early one day or something.

I beginning to feel a bit sorry that you may have gotten the wrong idea about oilpainting by watching Bob Ross and are now bumping into the reality of oilpainting without the special Bob Ross brushes and paints. I'm told that these Bob Ross brushes can indeed be cleaned with (special Bob Ross, harhar) odourless thinner only, but for the rest of us that have to make do with normal oilpaint and brushes, cleaning brushes isn't so easy.

This is the reason why you need a lot of brushes, so that you can use one brush for each colour or group of colours that don't contaminate each other. Then you only need to clean them thoroughly with soap after the painting is finished or after each session if you don't paint often. Hardware store thinner should suffice for cleaning, but is unsuitable to mix with oilpaints. More thinner to clean the brushes isn't going to help, and might even damage the brushes.

If you are not going to paint in layers, you don't need to mix the paint with thinner. This is only done to make the underpainting 'lean', so that the paint of the upper layers can be diluted with linseed oil without cracking. In layered painting this is done to make the paint semi-transparant so that the underpainting shines through, giving the painting the typical depth and brilliance of layered painting. But for alla prima painting this 'fat over lean' principle isn't an issue. Brilliance is achieved by placement and purity of colour.

Hm... So it comes again to the question of whether to invest more money in this. Even "cheap" brushes aren't really cheap, and I know if I'm going to invest in more brushes I should get decent ones, which are quite expensive (especially if I'm buying several at once).

There's a few things I'm trying to save up for at the moment - most notably, an MP3 player and good headphones so that I can ride the metro to and from work each day without so much overstimulating stress. Maybe I should either set the oils aside for now, or else plan to work only with a couple of colors at a time to avoid constant cleaning and mixing until I decide it's worth investing in more brushes. I'm used to just painting/drawing something all at once and I suspect I will not be able to finish things that take a lot of waiting - I tend to lose interest in something if I don't "get it out" all at once. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway I still love Bob Ross and will continue to watch his show like I always have to enjoy his soothing voice and beautiful work, but I probably won't try to paint like him again. In fact, it was never my goal to paint landscapes - I just thought it might be a good way to learn to use oils. (Apparently not so!) My style is something completely different than that and I'll have to experiment to find a way to make these tricky paints work for me.

Get the MP3 player first! Reducing stress from sensory overload is much more important.

You can still work in oil without having to spend more money on oilpainting supplies. It's even highly recommended for beginners to limit the palette to just a few colours and black and white. You can do a lot with just the three primary colours, or two earth colours and a blue.

What colours do you have in your painting set?

It's a big set. The tubes of paint are small but there's a wide range of colors. Here's the full list:

zinc white
zinc titanium white
lemon yellow
yellow ochre
raw sienna
orange yellow
vermilion
scarlet
purple red
burnt sienna
burnt umber
raw umber
emerald green
viridian
cerulean blue
ultramarine
pththalo blue
black

The tubes are only 12 ml so they'll run out fast but I have a lot of options for colors. I have a similar set for acrylics, and another for watercolors. I've had the watercolor set for about five years and I haven't even used half of any of the tubes yet, and the acrylic isn't getting used up much faster, but in just a few days with oils I've gone through nearly half a tube of a couple of colors (partly wasted because of my useless attempts to highlight wet background colors). Seems oil painting also takes more paint than other types.

The limiting factor is really the paintbrushes I think. I have a set of soft brushes that work ok with these oils - a 3/4" wash brush, #6 shader, #2 shader, #4 round, #2 round, and 2/0 liner. I also have a cheaper bristle set with a few more sizes, but those ones are really cheap and don't work very well. In addition I bought just for oils a #16 and #10 shader, and a friend gave me a couple of round brushes (#10 and #12 but neither seem to be very good quality). It seems like a lot of brushes when I write it out, but there's really only a few that I really feel comfortable using. It's easy using watercolor or acrylic because I mostly only use a couple of these brushes (the small shaders, small round and the liner) and just wash them between colors. The rest of the range are rarely used or only used for certain situations. The rarest thing for me to use is the really big brushes. Even when drawing with pencil, I can't draw big things. I can only do details, so big brushes don't do me much good.

If anyone is interested in the type of things I do, feel free to have a look at my tumblr, which contains various types of art: http://airavj.tumblr.com - there's more of this type of art near the bottom than the top, and in the middle is mostly video work and old comics.

And once more, thanks for all the advice and help. I'm feeling more confident now and nearly ready to try these once more, and less anxious about whether they will work properly or not.

Hmmm... yes, it seems the brushes are a problem. Seeing your style (I like it!), you would probably like the brushes that are used for detail in oilpainting. These are *not* the same as the fine brushes that are suitable for watercolour. For oil, the best brushes are long brushes with natural hair. You could use the bristle brushes, but these are better suited for painting shapes and bold lines. Unfortunately, oil brushes that are good for detail are expensive (ox hair, Kolinsky sable, squirrel, badger). The upside is that these natural hair brushes are easier to clean, but still not as easy as watercolour or acrylic.