Oil Painting Essentials — Everything You Need To Get Started
Get started with oil painting: a guide to our recommended tools and materials for those looking to get started with this traditional painting medium. One of the oldest painting techniques, oil paint is made from binding pigments to an oil and offers artists a rich coloured paint with an adaptable texture. The slow drying nature of the paint allows artists to rework fine details over many painting sessions, while the thick, buttery texture is well suited to expressive brush strokes and impasto techniques.
The Painting Essentials
Oil Paint
We offer the Winton Oil Colour range by Winsor & Newton, traditional but affordable oil paints made with a high pigment load in a range of beautiful colours. These paints offer excellent coverage and tinting strength with a uniform consistency, making them ideal for both beginners and experienced oil painters.
We stock the full colour range of Winton oil paints, but if you’re just starting out we recommend choosing the following colours for an all-purpose palette:
Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow Pale Hue, Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Umber & Titanium White.
If you’re looking for a more environmentally friendly choice, we stock Winsor & Newton’s Artisan Water-Mixable Oils — water-mixable paints designed to look and feel like traditional oil paints, offering the same rich consistency, depth of colour and permanence but able to be cleaned and thinned with water rather than solvents.
Oil Paint Brushes
We offer Daler Rowney’s range of Georgian brushes for use with oil colour, which have been specifically designed for use with oil, solvents and mediums. Each brush offers a long handle for more expressive mark making and are either made from a stiff hog hair bristle, ideal for thick applications of paint, or a softer sable hair ideal for finer details.
To start, we’d recommend choosing two or three brushes and adding to your collection as you get more comfortable. Filbert brushes are extremely versatile, with an oval shape that can be used to blend colours, create soft edges and add controlled marks making them an excellent choice to get started. Flat brushes are great for covering large areas with colour, such as backgrounds and gradients, while round brushes have a fine point that is well-suited to detail work.
To clean your brushes, you’ll need a solvent to help break down the oils. Traditionally artists use turpentine or white spirit to clean their oil paint brushes and thin their paints, but we recommend Robersons Studio Safe Orange Solvent as a safer, more environmentally friendly alternative.
To maintain the quality of your brushes over time, we'd recommend using The Masters Cleaner & Preserver. Work a little of this cleaner into your brushes to remove build-up, smooth and condition the bristles and protect the original brush quality.
Solvents & Linseed Oil
To alter the consistency and thin your oil paints, we’d recommend using a solvent such as turpentine, white spirit or our favourite, Roberson’s Studio Safe Orange Solvent. By adding a little to your paint, you can use these solvents to thin your oil paint to a consistency that suits your painting style, increasing the fluidity and helping to speed the drying time as the solvents break down the oil.
To increase the flow of your paint but slow the drying time, Linseed Oil is the most popular choice. This oil medium can be used by working a little into your paint to improve the flow of the pigment, increasing the transparency of your paint and offering a glossier finish as more oil is added.
As a general rule, the first layers of your painting should be mixed with a solvent to create thinner, faster-drying washes, helping to create a porous base for oils to absorb into as further painting layers are added. An oil such as linseed should be then progressively added to your paint with each new layer, which will slowly absorb into the underlying layers to create better adhesion. This is called the fat over lean rule — with oils typically adding ‘fat’ to your paintings and solvents making the paint ‘lean’. Painting a ‘lean’ fast-drying solvent over a ‘fat’ slow-drying oil can result in the painting sealing without each layer sufficiently drying, which can cause the artwork to crack over time.
Painting Palettes
As oil painting often involves mixing solvents and oils into your paint, it’s important to have a paint palette that can handle these mediums. Ceramic, glass, wooden and metal palettes are all great options when oil painting, as they can be sufficiently cleaned with solvents once used. Even an old plate or ceramic tile will do the trick if you’re just starting out!
We’d recommend a wooden palette for larger oil paintings, as these are lightweight and easy to hold while offering a large surface area for mixing and storing paints. We offer two sizes of wooden palettes, which come untreated and will need to be prepared before use by rubbing linseed or a similar oil into the grain with a soft cloth.
Disposable, tear-off palettes are also an option if you prefer an easy cleanup at the end of each painting session — we offer Winsor & Newton’s tear-off palette pad, which even has a thumbhole for easy holding while painting.
Oil Paint Surfaces
We offer a range of canvases, canvas boards and pre-treated paper pads that are suitable for oil painting without the need to prime the surface. For beginners looking for a surface to experiment on, we’d recommend Winsor & Newton’s Oil Paper Pad, which offers 10 sheets of pre-treated (or “sized”) paper with a canvas-style texture. Each page is gummed, allowing you to remove pages as necessary as you experiment with techniques and styles.
We also offer Winsor & Newton’s canvas boards, a more durable and rigid surface option for those looking to create layered and textured oil artworks. Each board has been covered with a stretched cotton canvas fabric, meaning it will not lose tension over time like a traditional canvas might, and has been primed ready for painting.
For a more traditional piece, Winsor & Newton’s Deep Edge Cotton Canvases offer a springy, responsive canvas surface ideal for painting on. Made from 100% cotton, these canvases have been coated with a high quality gesso primer, offering a professional finish for your final artwork.
Anything Else?
Once you’ve got the paint, brushes, a solvent, an oil, a palette and a surface, you’re good to go! Use an old jar or glass from the kitchen to hold the solvent and rinse your brush in and you’re ready to get painting. However, there are a few more supplies that you can add to your tool kit to help you experiment creatively with your oil painting.
Palette Knives
Palette knives can be a fun new tool for those experimenting with oil paints, either used alongside or as an alternative to a paint brush. They’re a great choice for those looking to add more textural marks, applying thick layers of colour or when mixing paints on a palette as they can help save your brushes from wear and tear. We offer a range of Daler-Rowney’s palette knives, from trowel-shaped spatulas and long, straight rounded blades to serrated-edge designs.
Oil Painting Mediums
There are a huge variety of mediums and oils you can add to your oil paints to help alter the drying time, consistency, texture and sheen of your paints. We’ve recommended Linseed Oil to help slow the drying time and a solvent to help speed it up, but other oils and mediums can also do this job while adding a different consistency or gloss to your artwork. Liquin is a popular choice amongst oil painters, who use it to speed up the drying time and give their paints a silky feel and glossy finish, while a Liquin Impasto Medium is a great choice for those looking to add interesting textures and layers to their work, as this medium will thicken the paint and help retain brushstroke or palette knife marks. You can browse our full range of mediums, solvents and oils for oil painting here.
Gesso Primer
Oil paint can be applied to most surfaces including canvas, paper and wood as long as the surface has been properly treated. We'd recommend appying 2-3 coats of acrylic gesso such as Winsor & Newton's Professional White Acrylic Gesso Primer to prep your surfaces before painting, which creates an even, lightly toothed surface for the oil paint to adhere to. If the surface has not been primed, there is a risk that the paint will flake off over time or even begin to rot as the natural fibres in the surface absorb the oil, so it's best to prime your surface before using.
Oil Paint Varnishes
Sealing your oil painting with a varnish prevents paint chipping or dust gathering, protecting your finished work. We offer both gloss and matte varnishes, depending on your desired finish, or you can mix a little bit of each together to create your own satin varnish.
Brush Washing Pot
Designed to help you clean your brushes with ease, this clever little brush washer is great for those working with oil. Add a little solvent to the pot and then use the spring at the top to suspend your brushes without damaging or bending the bristles. The mesh strainer at the bottom serves to catch any paint sediment, keeping your solvent cleaner for longer.
Have any questions? Please feel free to email us at hello@saltartsupply.co.uk, and we’d be happy to help you! We love to see the work you create using our tools, materials and recommendations, so make sure to tag us @saltartsupply on Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok.
