When you start painting, one question that you may ask yourself is – what medium should you focus on? The 3 main choices can be oils, acrylics, or water colours. However, in this post, we will discuss the differences between oil painting and acrylic.
It will be more beneficial if you aim to master just only a single medium. By this eventually, you can improve across all other mediums too. Lana is an artist for acrylic paint, but she is equally proficient in oil painting.
It is important to know that any good painting will need good drawing skills. Whether you go for acrylics or oil paint, having skills in drawing will be the foundation that can guarantee success in the painting profession.
For many centuries most painters have tried to work with paints for producing artwork on certain canvas or any other surfaces and the two most popular paint types are oil and acrylic, which can offer similar results. However, there are critical differences between these 2 types of painting.
If you ever try to know how Lana Zueva become artist then you will learn that she started with oil painting and later she switched to acrylic.
What are the key differences?
Oil paints dry significantly more slowly than acrylic paints. Because oil paints take longer to dry, you will have greater versatility with them. It may take a maximum of up to one year for oil paints to cure completely. Acrylic paints require deliberate strokes because the paint dries quickly once applied.
With oil paints, you must paint thickly over thin and fat paint over lean. The top paint layers will crack if they cure before the bottom layers of paint. The slower your paint dries, the thicker and fatter it is.
Make sure you have a system in place for ensuring that each succeeding layer dries at a slower rate than the one before it. As acrylic paint dries, it darkens in colour. This is not a problem with oil paints (however a few oil paints may get a certain yellow tinge over some time). When using acrylic paints, you will have to account for the colour shift.
Oil paints make blending easier. Get to know a certain large blending brush because you will be using it a lot in oil painting. For oil painting, this is the most significant advantage of oil painting. If you are painting any landscape, for example, you can merge the Foreground Mountains into the sky, offering it a distant sense. Because acrylic paints dry quickly, blending is more difficult.
Oil paints are a disaster waiting to happen. It is far harder to clean or control oil paints than acrylic paints. To make your life simpler, invest in some high-quality cleaning supplies.
Oil paint has a slightly refined and glossy finish, whilst acrylic paints have a more matte feel.You will findmany artist’s paintings for sale are available in the galleries as well as online that are both oil painting as well as acrylic painting.
