My First Oil Painting

Because it stays workable for quite a long time and it's easy to blur edges with it, I have been thinking about oil paint lately. I finally broke down and bought myself 10 sheets of Arches "huile" paper for oil paints and five tubes of Winsor & Newton Artisan water mixable oil paint, yellow, red, blue, white, and black. Since I use bristle brushes for watercolor, I had plenty of brushes appropriate for oil. Today I decided to experiment!

On a small (8 x 10) sheet of paper taped to a piece of plexi-glass, I quickly drew a picture similar to the one I did in my last post. I mixed some colors on a paper palette, and I also tried mixing some colors right on the huile paper as I painted. I remembered that with oil, you paint dark to light, the opposite of watercolor, but I ignored that rule. I experimented with various brush strokes and even finger applications of paint.

The really big experiment was combining watercolor paint with the oil paint. I searched the web for any information about doing this, but found almost nothing, other than the rather obvious advice of not painting watercolor on top of an oil painting. My guess was that if you can add water to these paints, then you could also add watercolor, if you mixed it in, instead of or with water. I had not bought any burnt umber Artisan paint, so I tried adding my burnt umber watercolor to the Artisan white. And since I had bought a warm red (cadmium hue), I could not make a proper violet, and so I mixed some mineral violet into the Artisan white, too. We'll see what happens as the painting dries. And here it is:

The Trek 2

Compare this one to the painting in the previous post. And p.s., I just read that bristle brushes don't do well with water mixable paint, because they get mushy when wet. I didn't notice that, but it was a small painting. Winsor & Newton recommends a special synthetic bristle brush that they make. Hmmmmmm.