Getting Started With Oil Painting On Canvas

Oil painting is a beautiful and expressive art medium that might seem intimidating at first. While it does take practice, anyone can start and improve on it with the right knowledge and some essential oil paint supplies. Oil paint is well known for its rich colors and glossy dried surfaces that can add a great amount of visual appeal to a finished painted scene. The following tips will help you achieve good results with any type of oil-painted scene.

The most common surface for oil painting is a stretched canvas that's been pulled taut over a wood frame. You can buy a variety of sizes of stretched canvases at ourartsupplies.com, or you can build and stretch your own if you have a knack for DIY projects. Once you have the canvas in the size you want, you'll need to prep the surface with a type of acrylic paint called gesso, which will ensure a smooth application of your oil paints. If you choose not to prep the canvas with gesso, keep in mind that your oil paints will soak into the weave of the canvas rather than dry on top of it. This option is not necessarily a wrong one; it all depends on the desired effect you want with your finished painting.

For a smooth and even surface prepped with gesso, it's a good idea to apply it with a paint roller you can find in hardware stores, especially when you're painting on a larger canvas. Once your prepped canvas is completely dry, you'll be ready to prep your oil paints through a technique called glazing. This process will bring out the richness and glossiness of each color. When you're first starting out with oil painting, you won't need a large number of different colors. Good quality oil paint tubes of primary colors are essential, namely red, yellow, and blue. With some practice, you'll learn how to mix accurate secondary and tertiary colors from these three primaries.

Another must for oil paint supplies is a good quality set of brushes specially designed for oil painting. As with tubes of oil paints, you'll only need a few basic ones to start and can add more at a later time. Be sure to keep your oil paint brushes separate from any other brushes you use to paint with acrylics or other types of paint. Any of these oil paint supplies are available from local or online art supply sellers such as ourartsupplies.com.

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Getting Started With Charcoal Artwork

As one grows as an artist, the connection between their artwork and charcoal painting materials they choose becomes noticeable. Charcoal artwork is a lot of fun because it gives you the freedom to make big, sweeping movements across the sketching sheet while getting messy. If you're interested in learning how to draw with charcoal, you want to invest in some quality charcoal painting materials to accelerate your artistic development.

 

Hard or Soft Charcoal?

Just like ordinary pencils, charcoal comes in different varieties of hardness. The hardness rating is denoted using a number and a letter (H for hard, B for soft). 6B is often the softest, while HB is the hardest.

The harder the charcoal one uses, the lighter the line it produces on the drawing sheet. It's worth noting that softer charcoals produce dark lines that smudge easily, while their harder counterparts make cleaner, sharper edges.

 

Vine Charcoal

You can also opt for uncompressed charcoal, which comes in the form of vines. Like the name suggests, vine charcoal comes in the form of a burnt vine/willow branch. Unlike compressed charcoal, you'll find it in the form of long sticks that are harder and more delicate than the former. It also comes in varying thicknesses, from thin to jumbo size. Vines are ideal for creating very fine, light lines and shading throughout a sketch.

 

Drawing Paper

For most new artists, newsprint works as an economical drawing material where they can practice as much as they want to perfect their technique. While newsprint allows charcoal to produce a variety of marks, it tends to smudge easily due to the smooth paper. You could therefore opt for charcoal paper which as a fine-ribbed texture that highlights the charcoal's color. While you might make the occasional smudge, it creates a harder line drawing than a smoother sheet would. Experimenting by mixing and matching different charcoal and paper varieties will help you find the right combination for your style.

 

Work Area

When familiarizing yourself with a new drawing medium like charcoal, you want to work on a vertical surface. This reduces the likelihood of dragging your arm through the drawing. Besides, charcoal drawings are quite dark, which means highlights and details can be hard to see in shadow. Your best option would be to place an easel in a well-lit area so that you can make out all the details while getting the practice you need.

 

Eraser

Your best choice of eraser when working with charcoal is the kneaded eraser. Being quite soft, it can be molded easily by kneading it like clay. You can use it to remove a section of the drawing to create a highlight or as a blending tool when smudging charcoal into the finer parts of a drawing.

 Charcoal artwork is an easy technique to pick up, mainly due to the medium's forgiving nature. And you can try other charcoal painting materials as you please -- exploration is an integral part of the creative process. So start drawing with charcoal today and see what world you can open-up.

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All You Need To Know To Get Started With Colored Pencils Art Work

To get started in any kind of art, be it painting, drawing, crafts, or any other type, it is important that you have two main components. These two components are technical know-how (this is how you develop artistic skill) and the right tools. It is these two components that will determine how well you do as an artist, even if art is a mere hobbyist pursuit for you. We look at each component individually below and how they affect pencil color art.

1. Technical Know-How

Despite what the popular saying may suggest, ignorance is never bliss. The knowledge you lack can put you at a significant disadvantage while growing in knowledge can arm you with all you need to succeed. This is true in life and true in art. As such, it is important that (if you haven't already) you join a class somewhere or even start using self-teaching resources that are often available for free. Whatever you opt for, start learning. The more you know, the more you'll be able to do.

2. Getting appropriate tools

Tools are what you use to get the job done.   High-quality tools can allow you to do a better job, while low-quality ones can, at best, make the job at hand that much more difficult. As far as it relates to pencil color art, getting the right colouring pencil sets is imperative. Doing so can significantly improve the quality of your pencil color art.

Here is what to look for in colouring pencil sets

Sometimes, when you are a beginner, it is hard to know which colouring pencil sets may be best for you. However, with the following tips, sifting through the noise just got a whole lot easier. The three main characteristics to use to differentiate the quality between sets are:

A. Types

There is more than one type of colouring pencil sets available on the market. They include wax, oil, and water-soluble. Your artistic needs will determine which is more appropriate for you. Wax colouring pencil sets are great for providing coverage when you color. However, they break easily and are likely to wear quickly. Oil colouring pencil sets on the other hand use a vegetable oil based binder and are generally harder than wax options. Water-Soluble colouring pencil sets are either wax or oil-based, can be hard or soft depending on the make, and the pigment can be liquefied in water.

B. Surfaces

Knowing how surfaces or material you will be creating your art on, and how these surfaces respond to different types of colouring pencil sets, is very important to knowing what will work for you. Generally, porous surfaces can handle any type of coloring pencil crayon set. A toothy surface is needed to anchor the colored pencil's pigment if a heavy application of the same will be used. Rough or textured watercolor paper or cold pressed paper is a good fit for water-soluble colouring pencil sets.

Once you decide on your surface, you can opt to use the appropriately suited colouring pencil set.

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