Oil Paintings Can Flower

When you are producing flower landscape oil paintings, keep in mind the short canvas blend life of oil paints. If you are producing an oil painting of a flower landscape and you need to make a change that isn't immediately effective, the best thing to do is wipe it off with your paint rag and start over. This will work for the first 24 hours after your painting, as oil paintings take this long to dry. In fact, it's important not to make too thick a first coat or you'll never get your oil paints to dry.

One important piece of oil painting advice is to clean your paint brushes each time you change colors. You do this by first wiping as much paint off the brush with a rag as you possibly can and then inserting the brush into the paint thinner. Not only will this get more oil paints off your brush, but will extend the life of your thinner as well. Swish your paint brush around in the container of paint thinner, then dry it with your clean paint rag.

When the first layer of your flower landscape oil painting creation is finished, wait 48 hours before you start on your second paint application or you're going to end up smearing the work you already did. In the meantime don't leave your oil painting somewhere hot or humid. Make sure that its location will protect it from getting accidently scraped, smooshed, smeared, or touched at all.

Should you have a lot of paint left on the palette and you want to use it when you start your flower landscape oil paintings again, scrape the paint together with your knife. Next put a small amount of paint thinner on a cleam paint rage and use it to clean the rest of your paint palette. Plastic wrap is great for covering the paint that is leftover. Make sure you wrap it tightly though.

It's important as well, that until you start again with your flower landscape oil paintings, that you replace the lid on the container of paint thinner and set it aside, no matter how cloudy it looks. The paint thinner will settle and the pigment that is part of the paint will drop to the bottom of the container.

Clean thinner will settle at the top. The next time you go back to your flower landscape oil paintings you'll only need to pour that top layer of clean paint thinner into a new and clean thinner container, and wipe the pigment off the bottom. You then pour the good paint thinner back into its original thinner container and you're ready to start your flower landscape oil painting project once again.

Painting in Oils

If you've thought about doing oil paintings, here are some basics to get you started.

The first step in your production of oil paintings is to make sure that the area in which you are going to paint is well ventilated. You need a window or door that can be opened as you work, a good fan and a space that is fairly open so air is able to circulate.

If you are going to work on your oil paintings outside you'll have to be able to secure everything so the wind doesn't end up blowing things all over. Keep in mind that bees, and various other insects will flock to your citrus thinner. The first thing to do is put down your drop cloth, your tarp, your plastic bag and so forth. Secure the edges of each by using masking tape. This will keep it from getting bunched up. You're going to set up your oil paintings work area on the drop cloth so make sure the area is roomy enough for your comfort. If you are going to work on your oil paintings with a table easel set up on a table, you'll want to cover the floor below the table top and the place where you will stand or sit.

Before you start painting your oils, don your paint attire - gloves included. You'll need one container that has paint thinner and one container that holds a combination of two parts paint thinner and one part walnut oil. These containers should be about three inches high and two inches around. Each should be filled to the half way mark. You'll need a comfortable set up with an easy reach for your paint palette and knife, your brushes, the two containers, as well as paint rags and tubes.

Now set up the paints you'll use for your oil paintings. If you have a variety of colors, you don't need all of them squeezed out onto your paint palette. Start with just two or three colors. If your choices are only primary colors, then squeeze out onto your palette a dime size spot of cadmium red, yellow and blue. Space them as far from each other on the palette as possible, as if you are putting dots on the three points of a triangle. In the center of this paint triangle squeeze a nickel-size spot of Titanium white oil paint. Next use your knife to mix these colors.

Now you're ready to really start creating your oil paintings.

Painting Like the Masters

Oil paintings began in the Mediterranean during the era of the Greek and Roman civilizations. The Egyptians also used paint techniques that were rich in bees wax, pigments of such minerals as copper, iron and manganese oxides and tempera.

While historians have noted that the Mediterranean civilizations of this time were aware of flax, walnut, poppy seed and other vegetable oils there is not definite proof that they were used in oil paintings of the time.

The tempera these early oil painters used were organic mediums mixed as fluid with water and volatile oil additives. Italian artists of the next century used organic binding ingredients such as materials containing protein from whole eggs, animal glue or milk.

From the Roman Empire's demise to the 15th century Renaissance era oil paintings and tempera painting became prevalent. In Greece and Italy olive oil was the preferred based for pigment mixture preparation although this made for a long drying period and great difficulty for human models. Theophilus, a German-born monk and oil painter in the 1100's dispensed with olive oil in his oil paintings. In Japan a substitute for oil paintings was perilla oil, applied after a lead application as early as the 8th century. During the 1300's the Italian Cennino Cennini created oil paintings that were a combination of tempera and several layers of light oil.

Much later Leonardo DaVinci, who lived until 1519, created his own oil paintings concoction made by adding up to 10 percent bees wax to his oils and then boiling the combination.

If you'd like to follow in the footsteps of these great painters there are some simple preparations and techniques before and during your creation of oil paintings.

The first important technique is to dress for it, including gloves. Your tools include two containers, one with paint thinner, and the other with a combination of two parts thinner to one part walnut oil. Make sure you've made room in easy reach for your paint brushes, your palette and its knife, your containers, paint tubes and paint rags.

Your palette should start out with only 2-3 paint colors. Generally you'll need cadmium red, cadmium yellow and ultramarine blue to start.

Your palette knife is the oil paintings tool you use for the technique of mixing colors. Keep in mind that oil paints have a short blend life, so if you try to make a color change and it doesn't work right the first time quickly take a paint rag and wipe it off the canvas and start over.

One of the advantages of oil paintings that make the correction technique so much easier is that they take nearly a full day to dry. So, you have lots of correction time. On the other hand, because oil paintings take so long to dry and excessively heavy coat can slow your painting process considerably.

The brushes you use in your oil paintings must be cleaned well between each change of color. This technique is crucial. The first thing you do is remove as much of the paint as you can with the paint rag and then place the brush in the paint thinner. Swish the paint brush around in the thinner, and then dry it with the rag.

You must wait 24 hours after your first complete oil paintings application before you start your second or the first application will smear.