Oil vs. Acrylic Painting for Beginners: Art Professors Discuss

materials provided by Frederick's and Windsor Newton this has been a really fun exercise like the two of us painting the same still life you with oil me with acrylic there's a couple differences maybe the most obvious of all is the dry time yeah you were like two months ahead of me in terms of how far the painting is developed and it's so funny because I always think of myself as like a fairly slow painter but like it's nothing compared to just the dry time that oil can take well you are painting details and I hadn't even blocked out under painting at that point and even the under painting I got to wait a whole week for this to dry before I move on to the next layer if somebody's a beginning painter how would they know to pick acrylic or oil I like acrylic a lot because it's plastic based it's easy to get into it's not quite as expensive which is nice and it's really easy to do in the comfort of your own home right and with oil you really have to be responsible about disposal because a lot of the materials are toxic you have to be aware of the fumes that occur so you can't just paint with oil at home you either have to have a properly ventilated studio or you got to paint with every single window open so I think that's a concern and it worries me when people tell me oh I just picked up some oil paints and just play it around and it always freaks me out because I had a student tell me that they poured their mineral spirits into the toilet and I was like no don't do that that's not good you have to go to hazardous waste and dispose of it properly and so I think the thing about acrylics is that you can just go to store picks them up mess around that's totally fine totally but with oils you can't do that you really need instruction for how to use it responsibly you have a lot more to think about with oil like the toxicity sometimes the costs and stuff but you can get things with oil that you can't get with any other medium right I think there's this just beautiful transparency in oil paintings that you don't get anywhere else and just the feel of oil is so beautiful velvety and luscious and beautiful colors you will not get that with acrylic paint it's a very particular look that you can only get with oil and for me that alone is worth it it's worth the time to get that type of experience and I remember when I transitioned from acrylic to oil I just couldn't believe the difference in terms of the feel of the page just the way it felted my brush on the surface of the canvas I just loved oil so much I started with oil back in high school oh really so you did the opposite and so when I got into acrylic it took a long time for me to learn to love it because I was like oh well this isn't oil well I really didn't like acrylics for the longest time because I felt like because they dried so fast I couldn't blend like there'd be stuff I wanted to work on more but I couldn't because it dried and so when I discovered that oil paint took so long to dry I was like oh finally I can work on that stuff and not stress about oh no it dried I can't do it anymore both have things you can add like a fur acrylic paint you can add some slow dry mediums to add a little bit of length to the dry time with oil or you can quicken the dry time by adding for example Windsor Newton makes liquid so you add the liquid in and then it dries so much faster even though oil Nikolic have very specific built in dry times you can alter that I noticed that when you paint you have so many colors 90 so I feel like that would just be confusing for me you have to learn first how to mix colors before you can give yourself the luxury of having different colors in the two if you start out painting with like 10 different colors you're tempted to not mix because you have such a wide range hey that's funny because when I started painting I started with light six blues and five yellows and I had so many colors and then my senior year in art school I had this painting teacher and he said guys three colors and I was like what what am I gonna do I only have one blue one red and one hello and I felt traumatized at first but that really makes you mix your colors yeah and it makes you very sensitive to all the subtleties and so I really feel like that helped me a lot to understand color mixing I mean I actually ended up with a few colors more than three but definitely not as many as you have so I'd like to have two yellows two blues two reds and one brown and that's it but the thing is the two Reds that I pick are really different from each other for example I really like alizarin crimson which is a really probably blood like red but then cadmium red is very yellowy and very thick that's enough of a range that I have some options it's not that limited but it's also not like I have six Reds an acrylic is funny for me because it's one of the only paints for all use like blacks or whites and even then I don't use him that much oh because I've banned black from my palette I don't even buy black paint because I just feel like black paint is like this bomb it just eliminates everything around it and I also feel like people go to black as a default way of making shadows yeah and I can always tell when somebody has done a painting and they've only used block to paint those shadows so I find whenever I've taught painting I say to the students don't buy any black paint because you're all going to resort to doing that and I found my favorite mixture for black paint is Viridian with alizarin crimson because what it creates is a really deep purple and if you put it on very opaque Lee it looks like black yeah but it's vibrant I find the same thing with white actually which is why I use like Naples yellow for white nine times out of ten because it's so easy a thing for people to log like white is bright when in fact it actually mutes the colors and tones them down well I feel like you know when there's a really dramatic lighting situation and there's that like little speck of the brightest I'd love to paint but I just find people resort to just thick white but what I find is that white by itself looks really pasty like it and have that luminous quality that I wanted to have so what I usually do when I'm painting that highlight is I mix mostly white and then just a little touch of cadmium lemon and that gives it just a little spark which is really nice to have one tool that I think people number one don't use enough but also severely underestimate is the palette knife Oh totally the palette knife for me is absolutely necessary for mixing paint and oil because if you try to mix your pants in oil with just your brushes everything gets into this horrible muddy mess of colors and then it's just impossible to clean later on I use the palette knife a lot in acrylic paint but not to mix with to paint with and I do that because acrylic paint dries so quickly so it's not very practical for me to mix a big glob of a color because that'll go dry and waste all the paint I get into the mode of using a palette knife for example I noticed that you mix as you go with your brush and I think you can do that with acrylic paint but for me I just sit down with a pen knife and I just mix for a half an hour or I get started and a palette knife is an awkward tool I feel like I see people using it incorrectly a lot of the time and the main problem I see is people don't press down hard enough they just sort of slide it side to side but you really have to put pressure and muscle into it to get it to actually mix all the way don't be afraid to put your back into it you know yeah and you can turn it upside down and make it scrape this way so it's a much more versatile tool than I think people realize and it is a little strange to use at first but I think it's really important to get to know your palette knife there's mediums you can use for both acrylic and oil painting which a lot of people when they start think are unnecessary but honestly they're game changers for it like acrylic a lot of people think oh I can just use water but no it's really nice to use slow dry bonding medium or matte medium and those can totally change the way you paint but I noticed that with acrylic the mediums that you're using they're pretty much just right of the bottle I mean you don't seem to do anything else with them or as with oil I always make my own medium so for example the recipe that I use is one part stand oil one part linseed oil and then three parts mineral spirits or I've seen other recipes where people say use gum turfs damar varnish withstand oil was another recipe that I was given when I was in art school and so I find that every oil painter has their own mediums that they use and so with oil it's a little bit more custom in terms of what you prefer brush cleaning is so important especially for these two mediums I mean with acrylic if you're not careful to wash the paint out of your brush in a tub of water while you're going and then cleaning with soap and water when you're done you can ruin a perfectly good brush and there's no need to I mean you can own your brushes for years oh my god I have brushes from senior year and or awesome it's like over 20 years ago and the reason I have them is because I really took the time to take care of them to wash them properly and I just find a lot of people either don't wash their brushes or especially with oil it's easy to wash them incorrectly like with oil paint you'll go to the art store and there's all these brush cleaners that you see but I use dnl hand cleaner which is a hand cleaner you just pick up at any hardware store and it's like magic it's the best hand cleaner for oil paint and a lot of people they just sort of run the brush under the water and I say no take your brushes rub them around in your palm and that really pushes all of the paint out of your brush yes so rush care may seem like a boring unimportant part of the process but I think it's so important yeah and it saves you so much money in the long run you really have to take care of it or else you're gonna have to keep buying brushes again and again this still life was funny because you were blown away that I didn't do thumbnail sketches for ever sort of horrified yeah I'm such a stickler about really figuring out the composition and all the different angles and exploring your possibilities so Wow how can you get away with that well I think it's funny because I do with thumbnail sketch for everything else I work on it it's a portrait or all of my illustration work I of course do thumbnail sketches for since a lot of people I think view still life says boring mm-hmm for me when I don't you a thumbnail and I get to explore it and find what I find interesting with the painting and make it a little bit more freeform like hiking off the trail you know I just feel lost like that would make me crazy I mean for me that's like going to a country you've never been to and just wandering around for 18 hours and walking down the same street eight times I really feel like I need just a little bit of a preview for what is gonna happen and I guess the other thing is when you work on a bigger scale which I do when I paint with oil if I mess up the composition I gotta erase everything and then start again and so if I have a little bit of a roadmap that just cuts back on the amount of backtracking and mistakes I have to clean up and I just feel more confident when I start under painting for acrylic I always start with pencil so in a way my sketch is right on the canvas itself how would drive me crazy because to me the leap from a pencil sketch to a brush is too much like if I'm gonna sit down and paint I got to be in the mindset to think through a brush from the very beginning so the way I started painting is I actually take if I'm using adjustment canvas I'll take acrylic paint which is burnt sienna I'll just put a very thin wash over it because for me that gets rid of the big blank scaredy white page that nobody is afraid of and then after its dried in then I can just take like washed out burnt sienna and just do a quick line sketch of the composition mm-hmm and that can work really well for oil because it's so malleable you know right but with acrylic like that line sketch done in acrylic paint that creates like that surface texture the dries really quickly and you've got to live with that the rest of the painting well the universe commenting on like my weird under painting I've liked all the wacky that would just confuse me I feel like oh there's a blue lobster there okay what do I do that I would find that impossible because I like some of the under painting just show through it helps where I do the under painting in the opposite or complementary colors so for example the lobster the under painting was in blue mm-hmm and there's the blue that's visible towards the end of it but I think part of that is that you don't work in such separate layers the way I do because I really paint let it dry for a week paint let it dry for a week you're just doing a marathon sprint basically and I can't do that I really have to break it up and so I can't count on that blue showing through the orange it's not gonna happen for me and that's funny because it hits back to what I think will always be the biggest difference between acrylic and oil is dry time mm-hmm yes that's really ultimately what it comes down to and I feel like with oil it's even slower than acrylic and you have to have ten times the amount of patience because I feel like the first three layers of oil never look good and so people get really frustrated because they're like how come my painting doesn't look better and I'm like because you need to build up a significant amount of paint yeah before it starts to have any type of death that was so funny working with you on this and we both had that point where it's like you know jokingly circa the five percent of the painting is done and we're both like well these look terrible right yeah yeah absolutely and I mean embarrassing terrible you have to always work your way through that that'll be in every painting you know and you just have to deep breath and just get to six percent and then you're good a lot of people before they paint they've done a lot of drawing and drawing is so fast and immediate and get the results right away you don't have to wait for anything to dry and so if you're used to that rhythm switching over to painting is a really big change and a lot of people just aren't prepared for that so cut yourself a break and don't stress about oh it looks it's kind of look terrible for a while a cotton rag is one of my favorite tools for painting because when I'm sketching out the lines of the basic composition I usually have my rag in one hand and my brush in the other and I'll brush in a line ago I don't like that take the rag wipe it out yeah it's the greatest thing and that's such a cool feature for oil you can't do it with acrylic no because it's dry absolutely yeah by the time you have time to think about do I like that line too late you can't really wipe off acrylic it's it can't be done and also if you use a rag like the acrylic paint will dry on it and it'll harden oh that's no good it's done I mean I can sit and paint for a restraint with the same rag and it's not a problem the other thing though about rags is you got to make sure that you disposes them properly like you don't want to leave like a heap of oily rags like Oh in your studio you need to get one of those containers that are this fire safe red metal containers and you just stick your rags in there and then you know it's because they're very flammable for oil painting I always work in layers but one rule that you really have to think about if you want your paintings to be archival and not crack is this concept of fat over lean because if you're doing an under painting you can't glop on thick chunks of oil paint and then when it's dry put another layer on top that's thinner the reason why is because actually technically speaking an oil painting takes a year to properly dry unless you want to wait one year before you put on that next layer you have to start thin and build towards the thickness that's something that you really have to be aware of because I've had paintings crap because I didn't follow that rule so with acrylic doesn't matter a lot of other painters I know who use acrylic really like to glop it on thick and they love that ability to do the really nice thick textures of it well that's an argument if you want to be a painter who paints hyper thick I would use acrylic I wouldn't I mean first of all you would break the bank paying for all those oil colors but also if you use acrylic and you want it paint thick you've got the flexibility you do it however you want you'd have to stress about it I would not paint that stick with oil it's a big pain I mean you can and I've definitely seen people do it but not for me cleanup is one of those things I think where it is obvious that acrylic is so much easier oh my god you just did trash you're done I clean the brushes clean the brushes really well then I throw the paper palette in the trash and pack everything up and I'm good and plus you don't have to worry about carrying a wet painting down the street no that is not fun as somebody who has done that before but I think if you are painting in oils you have to realize that you're not doing cleanup in fact it's you have to really give it a good amount of time because you got to put your rags into a fire safe can you have to make sure you dispose of your mineral spirits properly I mean what I use is a silikal brush cleaning tank which is the most phenomenal product ever made for oil painters and I remember for the longest time I'd go into the art store you know how you see those gimmicky art supplies that are supposed to be better but they're really just stupid that's what I thought about the silicone brush cleaning tank and then I had an oil painting teacher how does by it and I started using it I was like oh my god my life is so much better after I bought this because what it does is it has a coil on the inside and you stick your brush in and so the coil gets all the paint out but then the coil is raised up so all the settles down at the bottom and then wait yeah then you waste the next day and all your efforts are perfectly clean because all the sludge is at the bottom oh that's awesome it's go awesome and so technically speaking I don't have to dispose of the sludge in the mineral spirits until the tank is just full which takes a while even for somebody who paints quite a bit but then I need to go to household hazardous waste yeah I can't just dump it down the sink or the toilet or anything you hear a horse stories all the time of like old linseed oil so drags like sketching fire in studio apartments because they're so flammable and like you really can't just throw that in with the rest of the trash and dump it out back like you've got a dumpster fire in your hands exactly and I've seen people do stupid things like smoke and oil paint at the same time and I'm just like why don't you just set your house on fire that would've been much faster with my glass palette I'm scraping it wins the window scrapers and I'm cleaning it with a rag then I got a toss the rag it's just a lot of cleanup oil painting is what you do when you have a lot of time and when you have the patience to invest in that but it's not always necessary and it's not always the best medium for everybody I happen to love it I could never paint an acrylic that would drive me crazy but it just depends on what suits you best acrylic is so easy in a lot of these ways and I do love it bye guys there are a lot of times I'm using acrylic paint where I wish it was act like oil painting does and I think this is the big reason oil painting is so intimidating because for a lot of people like weight you need to do how much stuff yeah yeah but and the supply was yeah the first oil painting class you take is like miles long and you just are traumatized when it comes all right stalk what I mean like if you do your research on it it is a really good investment when you go to the art supply store there's so many different types of gates to choose from I think it's very tempting to purchase the student paints because they're so much cheaper than the professional paints but when I first started oil painting that's exactly what I did I just went to the store and I bought student grade paints and I remember I was really frustrated with oil painting at that point everything I painted look so bad and I was really pissed off about it because I couldn't figure out how to solve my problems and then I had a painting teacher who was really specific about what to buy on the list like he said Windsor Newton professional grade quality French ultramarine and I'd never had a teacher be that specific before usually it was like buy blue buy yellow and it was not that specific and so I went to the store and I bought the Windsor Newton brand I started painting with them and I was like oh my goodness I cannot believe I have missed out on this ya brought all of my painting experience it's like I was shopping at Walmart for jewelry and now I'm shopping at Tiffany's like it was that dramatic of a difference from student grade to professional grade paints getting the cheapest level of paint that you can get it's not even a good representation of what you're working with like the cheap level of acrylics they're either way too watery or they're way too gloppy or way too runny they're just not well made I understand people are in a budget and they don't want to invest so much money but I had a student once who like me went to the store and thought oh well those are double the price I'm not gonna buy those I'm gonna buy the student grade and he was so frustrated with his painting that he just was like Oh fine I'll go to the store and I buy the good brush so he actually ended up making two purchases because he didn't want to buy the professional-grade pains at first you don't start by buying every color of the rainbow you know you just start with some basic colors but you make sure you get good colors and a good brand like Windsor Newton and the professional grade then you know what you're doing and then you can slowly build up your collection you definitely get what you pay for and that's not always the case in other areas of visual arts there's some times when I'm like don't buy the fifteen dollar chamois cloth just use a paper towel that's totally fine but I definitely think the brush quality matters I've had pre-stretch canvases yeah I've had just crappy brushes where the bristles are like follow every stroke there's like bristles left in the big thing actually or sometimes I'll paint with a cheap brush and then the brush top falls off and I think it's so worth it to just invest the money and good supplies because like you said it doesn't represent what the material does and the frustration is just not worth it mm-hmm I think when you start painting it really takes a while to figure out what type of brush technique you want to do when I first started oil painting I wanted everything to be hyper realistic I wanted to look exactly like that I didn't really explore anything else and then recently I've been looking at one of my colleagues paintings and they're so painterly and soft and subtle and I just was like why did I you never even try something like that so I think it's really good to just try a number of different ways of using your brush I think it takes a while to really get good at your brush technique because the brush to a lot of people is not a mysterious obscure tool most people used it at some point in the elementary school really understanding what the brush is capable of takes a long long time I wish I had explored more of a painterly direct approach with my brush work because I feel like I missed out on that well there's such a large to-do list for starting with painting you know it's like oh you've got to put in the practice oh you also have to look up the history oh you also have to explore different colors Oh color yeah let's not even go with that but be patient just discover as you go I mostly use gouache and what I do I really like high-level detail-oriented work it's like every medium has its purpose for me so when I use acrylic paint that's when I really let myself get very painterly almost like to meet washes work and I love it but painting is a hobby and it's a relaxing point so the material really influences your style actually absolutely yeah that's funny because I don't feel that way at all with oil painting I feel like with oil painting it's like what's my next goal and for me because I have so much experience painting realistically with this painting that I'm doing I'm trying to do anything about that I'm trying to do something more subtle and atmospheric who knows if it'll work out but that's what I want to try to do so for me it's about setting a goal saying okay this time this is what I'm gonna try I guess cuz you paint in so many different materials I don't I only oil paint I don't use gouache I don't use watercolor well maybe you think of it this way then compare like your oil painting to like your graphite drawings hmm worlds of difference you know for the past few years usually if I sit down to paint I'm by myself in the studio saying yeah but in this situation we're painting the same still life and you're painting side-by-side and I love it because I get to watch your progress I get to compare your techniques against mine because even though oil and acrylic are very different there are certain things that do cross over that are applicable to any type of painting the coolest take away I'm having from this is that thing of there's no wrong way to paint no I mean you don't want to do something terribly wrong like you know use water with oil paint no I mean that that really is a technical problem yeah but when it comes to how you use your brush or how you wear an apron I don't wear an apron you know I you mix large quantities of paint and I don't you mix as you go I mean that would drive me insane but it works for you yeah although painting can be technical ultimately you have to figure out what's gonna work for you I don't feel like I really had my own technique for many years I studied painting with four different professors in art school and each one of them taught me something different so even though it was my fourth painting class I still felt like I got something a little bit different really getting a sense of what's available and then tweaking it to what you want to do is a great way to go you can't just expect your style to happen overnight it happens through you experimenting and trying something new each time it takes a long time but that's sort of fun because you get to paintball time yeah it's a good journey who are some of the great oil painters like oh you got Michelangelo or you've got da Vinci and it's like the gods didn't pay me boils oh he totally did he didn't know he painted frescoes but he also did do paintings yeah but they weren't in oil they were like tempura weren't there no no he did some oils he did it they totally do yeah I don't want to be wrong I'm talking about that round painting where it's like of a dog doing this you describes like the entire rent no wait give me your phone give you a common oil in tempera and oil and yeah no that doesn't count that's what temporary material no no ex media fresco egg tempera on panel fresco ha it's not true oil you know it sometime from France

Channel: Art Prof: Create & Critique

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Keywords: oil painting, acrylic painting, acrylic painting tutorial, acrylic painting tutorial for beginners, acrylic painting techniques, oil painting tips, oil painting vs acrylic beginner, oil painting vs acrylic, oil acrylic painting differences, oil acrylic comparison, oil acrylic painting techniques, acrylic vs oil painting, oil vs acrylic paint, acrylic vs oil, winsor and newton acrylic paint, oil paint vs acrylic, oil vs acrylic, art oil painting, oil acrylic

Id: pzSGdNdrfSA

Length: 28min 0sec (1680 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 08 2018