How to Buy Oil Paints for Canvas Painting

Video Transcript

"I've shown you here a tackle box in which I keep lots of oil paints, and I do this so that I can close up the box, and I want to talk about the kinds of paints that you can buy. Some of these have been given to me many years ago, and many I've bought more recently. And I...and either you can deal with all these kinds of paints, or a group called My Mary, and Italian set, has a little.... Italian group has a try-out set that you can buy, and it really has three tubes of paint, the three primaries, yellow, blue and red. And so you can make your green from the yellow and the blue, and then you can make your orange from the yellow and the red, and you can make your violet from the blue and the red that you will mix. So that's one way that you can add white to make lighter tints, or add black to make darker shades. And that, I have friends that work only with these three colors of paint. There are smaller tubes and larger tubes. And just like watercolor or acrylic, a tube of paint can last for a pretty long time unless you're painting a large canvas. Most canvases for easel paintings are, let's say, ten by sixteen, or something, like, twenty by twenty-four. But you can also do thirty by forty, and much, much bigger paintings. And you'll go through a lot more paint when you do that. Paint can be used just out of the tube, you can mix it on a piece of paper like this. You can apply paint with palette knives. You can apply paint with brushes. There are many different kinds and sizes of brushes, larger brushes for larger canvases. There is....this is the tail end of a roller that was supposed to roll the paint out of a large tube of white. However, I still haven't gotten it quite out of the tube. When you use the larger tubes, such as these bigger tubes, they won't fit in any of the compartments so that they have to go, you know, down below. But these are colors that I frequently use when I'm painting, and I just finished doing a couple of very large pieces. Also, for white paint, there's titanium white, and there's other whites, and some cover more than others. Some paints are more buttery than others. Some...they, they're made by an enormous group of different people. Daniel Smith up in Seattle. The Gamblin people, who have taken many of the poisons out of paint. People talked about mad-hatters with mercury, well, paint has barium and other heavy metals and many of those have been taken out and replaced now with chemical paints. You can...you can look at the manufacturers information to be sure that you're not buying something that would hurt you. Cadmium's another heavy metal. So to make all these paints, you can see that we have brilliant color that's pretty long-lasting now, much more so than it used to be. You can mix with turpentine alone, you can mix it with poppyseed oil. Or you can mix it with something which is....here's one, just one object called Gamsol. You can mix it with various other, you know, you can mix different kinds of oil and different kinds of mediums. We used to use turpentine all the time, but the smells are not very good from that, and it can be injurious to your health. So there are also kinds of oils that you mix with water, and I haven't even gone into those kinds, but I prefer the slow drying, regular oil paints that you would mix with Turp, or Gamsol or some other medium. You can add thinners, you can add quick dryers, but an oil painting will either be done very quickly, a la prima, in one go, or you can paint on it, and take your time, and fix and eye shadow or something, if you want, over a longer period of time. You can clean your brushes, and add new medium in these little cups if you want to, or you can just avoid those all together. When you're done, you're going to clean these paints off your body, your clothing, whatever, and some are more easy to get out than others. But at least I hope this has given some small inkling of information as to what to look for when you're buying paints. This is Eileen Pestorius. Until the next time."