Starting with Oil Painting: Everything You Need to Know

Why Oil?

Oil painting has been the dominant fine art medium for 600 years, from the Renaissance masters to contemporary painters. The reason is simple: oil paint gives you control and time that no other medium offers.

Unlike watercolor, which dries in minutes and cannot be reworked, or acrylic, which dries too fast for subtle blending — oil paint stays workable for days or even weeks. This allows you to build up layers, correct mistakes, blend colors on the canvas itself, and achieve the deep, luminous quality that makes old master paintings look like they're lit from within.

What You Need to Start

Paints

For a beginner palette, you need only 7–8 colors:

In Bangladesh, Camel and Camlin student-grade oils are available at art supply shops in Dhaka's Elephant Road. For professional grade, look for Winsor & Newton or Gamblin at specialty stores.

Surfaces

The most common surface is stretched canvas — cotton or linen canvas stretched over a wooden frame. It must be primed with gesso before use.

Linen is superior to cotton but more expensive. For beginners, cotton canvas is perfectly adequate.

You can also paint on:

Brushes

Start with a basic set of hog bristle brushes in sizes 2, 6, 10, and 14. Bristle brushes are stiff and move paint confidently. Add one or two soft filbert brushes for blending.

Medium and Solvent

The Fat Over Lean Rule

The most important technical principle in oil painting: paint fat over lean.

Lean paint = paint thinned with solvent (dries fast)

Fat paint = paint mixed with oil (dries slow)

Each successive layer must be more oily (fat) than the layer below it. If you reverse this — fat paint under lean — the lower layer dries slower than the upper layer and the paint film will crack over time.

In practice:

Building a Painting in Layers

Stage 1: Tonal Underpainting (Grisaille)

Mix a neutral grey-brown using Raw Umber + Titanium White, thinned with solvent. Block in the main light and dark areas of your composition. Let dry overnight.

Stage 2: Color Blocking

Using your full palette, establish the main color areas. Don't try to finish anything — just get the color relationships right. Thin paint.

Stage 3: Refinement

Build up thicker paint. Work from dark to light — paint the lights last, with the thickest, most opaque paint. This is called impasto.

Stage 4: Details and Glazing

Glazing — applying thin, transparent layers of color over dried paint — creates luminous depth that no single layer can achieve. Mix your color with a lot of linseed oil and very little pigment. Apply over dry paint.

Common Beginner Mistakes

Mud — mixing too many colors together creates grey mud. Keep your palette clean and mix colors with purpose.

Overworking — the temptation to keep touching the painting kills fresh paint marks. Put it down and walk away.

Not waiting for layers to dry — patience is the most important skill in oil painting.

Too much solvent — excessive turpentine makes paint too thin and lean, weakening the film.