Painting Vocabulary
When you’re first getting started in a new medium, just like a new language, a lot of the first uphill climb is going to be about vocabulary. So let’s take a look.
Oil paint is made of pigment and oil. (Plus some stuff). The oil holds all those color and expensive particles of dust from floating away.
Mediums are made of straight oil (walnut, linseed, etc) or a combination of oil + solvent. You use mediums to modify your paints to be thicker or thinner.
Solvents break down your pigments. Which means they can be used to modify your paints by making pigments thinner OR to clean a brush. This is similarly to how a watercolorist uses water to thin down watercolors or to clean off a brush.
If you’re just getting started with oils, you don’t have to use mediums. You can use the paint straight from the tube.
You also could use solvents only at the end of your process to clean up.
Put it to Practice:
The first battle of materials begins with knowing names and terms.
It’s true for color.
For example, knowing that something is blue, doesn’t tell you a whole lot. But if you know it’s Ultramarine blue then you can start learning what that means.
It’s true for different media.
For example,if all you know is that some acrylics are thick and some are thin, it can feel like they are all the same. But once you realize that paints come in different viscosities and that acrylic paint breaks down into high flow, fluids, soft body, and heavy body (each of those names representing a very specific and different thickness) suddenly you can start problem solving.
In a technical medium like art, names matter.
So if you find yourself getting confused, it might be worth spending a bit of time at a manufacturer’s website (Golden and Gamblin both have AMAZING resources at theirs) learning what everything is called.
Because once you’re familiar with the names, you can build on that knowledge.
Get clarity on oil mediums and solvents by listening to Ep.53 with Mary Weisenburger from Gamblin.