Buying Oil Paint: 8 Things You Need To Know

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So, you want to know everything there is about buying oil paint, right?

I get it! Oil painting is incredibly inspiring! It all starts with all of the old classical oil paintings that are wildly loved all over the world.

Acrylics and other paints (except tempera) were invented later. Yet, despite them being more modern and simpler in use, people turn to oil paints for their specific features.

You can create amazingly realistic paintings, full of tender colors and light, or you can slap them on your canvas, creating an abstract reflection of your emotions.

With oil paints anything is possible! They are satisfyingly thick, feel nice to apply, and have that specific smell of a painter’s workshop.

If you are a beginner in oil painting and want to try it out, you most likely don’t own any oil paints yet. Therefore, you may find yourself looking through the catalogs and thinking that you have no idea what you need. But we’re here to let you know that it’s not as hard as it may seem.

Yes, you will need some extra tools and mediums while you oil paint, the ones that aren’t used while working with other paints. But you’ll figure them all out very soon with practice.

And to make it even easier for you, we broke down a few key points you’ll need to know about oil paints and how to choose them.

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Buying Oil Paint: Quality

Basically, there are three types of paint quality: student, artist, and professional grade. We don’t take children’s kits into consideration at all, because even though they’re very cheap, they are extremely poor quality.

You can find decent paints to use even among the student grade oil paints, so the difference is not a question of life and death. But let’s talk about what makes them different in the first place.

These 3 types of paints vary in their quality and, respectively, their price. All oil paints are made of similar ingredients: pigment, binder, and, possibly, fillers. But the pigment quality can be different, as well as the binders, and low-quality fillers usually make the paint cheaper by reducing its properties.

Cheaper paints can be great for sketching, but if you want your paintings to look good and last for a long time, pay attention to what they contain.

Student grade paints contain less pigment and more filler ingredients in them. They can also contain pigment hues (substitutes) or mixes (when the actual pigment is mixed with cheap equivalents). It can be compared to juices when you can have a 100% juice, diluted juice nectar, or juice-based drinks.

Hues are much cheaper, but it really shows in their quality, lightfastness, and strength, so it’s better to avoid them.

But other than that, it’s okay to buy student-grade paints from reliable well-known brands. They always know how to make decent student-grade paints that retain good properties and don’t turn mixing into mud wrestling.

There isn’t too much difference between artist and professional grades, and if you’re a beginner, you won’t notice these differences. So you don’t really have to spend a fortune on professional paints before you get many hours of practice with more affordable ones.

And when you feel confident enough to exhibit your works – time to switch to the professional paints!

Another tip is that you can buy bigger tubes of student grade quality paints if you use these colors a lot. You will also have the colors that are really strong and you’ll need little drops of them here and there. In that case, buy smaller tubes of higher quality (therefore more pigmented) paint, and they will last for a really long time.

Making Oil Paint Yourself

Many experienced artists actually make their own paints, because it can be cheaper if you know what color palette you use all the time. It’s not as hard as it sounds, and if you’re really into it and that sounds like a lot of fun to you, you can try that.

Paints consist of pigments and binders, and while binders don’t react with the pigments themselves, they can be suspended in certain liquids (depending on what the binder is). In our case, all you need to make your own oil paint is a pigment, oil (you can buy them in art stores), a clean surface and a spatula.

There are plenty of instructions online, and it’s really as easy as it’s shown. It feels a lot like baking or making homemade pasta – adding small amounts of liquid to dry ingredients until it has the necessary consistency. Different colors require different amounts of liquid, but the result will be pretty similar: thick, beautiful oil paint.

Note: If you are interested, I fount this cool YouTube video that walks you through the process of making your own oil paint.

What do you need to know about Binders?

Despite all of the oil paints being based on, well, oil, there can be some nuances. Different oils made from different plants can have different properties due to their chemical composition. And modern technology has allowed oil paints to be made with artificial ingredients that resemble all qualities of classic oils.

Don’t be confused by the term “drying oils”, they are just regular traditional oil binders that are used in paints. Oil paints don’t dry because of water evaporation as acrylics or watercolors do. They dry because acids in them form a film on the surface when being exposed to oxygen long enough.

Since these oils are natural, they are the least expensive binders, but they also have certain properties. Linseed oil, the most popular and thick one, makes a film that is resistant to cracking, yet has a tendency to yellow over time. Other oils, like walnut, safflower, and poppy, don’t yellow so much, but layers of paints made with them will crack after a certain period of time. But these properties are probably what makes oil paints the way they are.

Resin-oil and alkyd resin binders are pretty close to regular oil, but they speed up drying time significantly and are resistant to yellowing. You may prefer some of these, depending on your tastes and the techniques that you use.

There is also such option as water-mixable oils, which have a water-soluble binder that eases up the painting and cleaning process by excluding the necessity of solvents. They behave like regular oils but will require specific painting mediums.

Buying Oil Paint: Basic Colors

For oil painting, you don’t really need to buy huge paint sets of many colors. You would probably do that with markers, pencils and other mediums that aren’t mixed easily or don’t mix at all. But with oil paints, it’s really easy (and often necessary) to mix new colors with the existing ones.

Limiting your palette can actually help your works have more harmony and balance in their colors, which is a pretty important thing in painting. So, the basic color palette you’ll require should definitely contain such colors as:

The idea behind using this palette is to have black, white, and the warm and cool versions of three main colors. With them, you can mix almost anything!

If you lean towards landscape paintings, it would also be useful to have an earthy color, such as burnt umber (my personal favorite for underpaintings) or raw sienna.

Having a clean green color, like viridian, can also be helpful, because of how colors of nature can be hard to get exactly as they are.

If you want to spice thing up, and love “popping” colors, I’m also currently in love with:

These are some of the colors that you can’t mix with other paints because, as you probably know, when mixing paint together the saturation drops. So if you like vibrancy in your work – you will love these colors too!

Understanding the labels on paint tubes

There are two important features of paints that you’ll need to know, which are opacity (non-transparency) and lightfastness (permanence). That depends not on paint quality, as you might think, but on the color itself. Pigments are made of different minerals that have different chemical properties, which affects said features of paints.

You can find the information on the paint tubes. To read the labels, you’ll have to know the following meanings:

Opacity ranges:

T – Transparent,
S/T – Semi-Transparent,
S/O – Semi-Opaque to O – Opaque colors.

Permanence ranges:

AA – extremely permanent,
A – permanent,
B – moderately durable,
and C – Fugitive.

Knowing these properties you will be able to choose the right colors for your palette and predict how your painting will look and how long will it last.

Buying paint sets or customizing them?

Readymade oil sets are surely convenient because they contain extra items for the beginners to create paintings. They can include brushes or canvases, and it’s a great option for those who don’t want to purchase them separately. But keep in mind that the low price of the sets will result in the poor quality of the extra items in those sets.

Another benefit of a readymade paint set is that all of the items in it would be compatible with each other. This is an important thing in the case of oils because paints from different sets can be made using different binders, and they might react unpredictably.

In case of customizing your own paint set (buying separate tubes, brushes, etc.) you definitely won’t get the colors that you won’t use, as it can happen with readymade sets. You can also alter tube sizes and paint quality within your set the way you prefer them to be.

Buying Oil Paint: Where and what to buy

Buying oil paint can be a tedious task, but with all of the information you just learned you are way ahead of other artists! Yet, we wanted to help out further…

So, we’ve included a list of examples of what paint sets you can buy and which stores offer the best options. You don’t necessarily have to pick the following ones, but this will give you a glimpse of what you can choose.

Williamsburg Oil Signature Colors Set

This convenient set contains eight 11 ml tubes of colored oil paints and a bigger, 37 ml tube of titanium white. White is usually the most used paint ever, and it will be mixed into a lot of colors. Therefore, it’s a useful thing to have a bigger tube of it laying around.

The paints in this set are handmade, and they have remarkable lightfastness. They will help all of your ideas come to life just the way you pictured them in your head.

Check it out on: Amazon or Blick

Gamblin 1980 Oil Color Exclusive Set

This introductory set will be a great choice for beginners (but also for experienced artists who want to limit their palette). The color range includes the most necessary colors, and all of the other colors can be made out of them easily.

Gamblin 1980 oil colors won’t get dirty during mixing, no matter how hard it gets, and they will provide excellent texture to your paintings. This high-quality student grade paint set will be your trustful companion as you gain your experience.

Check it out on: Amazon or Blick

Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Colour Paint Basic Set

Despite being not too pricey, this set offers you high-quality oil paints that will satisfy everyone. It contains ten 21 ml tubes of the most necessary colors that you can create an entire world with.

All of the colors in the set have great lightfastness and permanence capabilities. They can also be intermixed with other oil paint brands, which makes them versatile and convenient. You’ll still have to check the binder type though, just in case.

Check it out on: Amazon or Blick

Sennelier Artists’ Extra Fine Oil Paint

These paints will give you amazingly luscious colors because they are made from the finest hand-ground pigments. They use safflower oils as a binder, which helps them not yellow over time and gives them an exquisite buttery texture.

They would be equally good for beginners to experience what good paints feel like, and for experienced artists who already know what they are looking for. Sennelier also produces some exclusive colors that you’ll find only in their sets (or separate tubes).

Check it out on: Amazon or Blick

Blick Artists’ Oil Color

This is a set of eight artist-grade oil colors that will help you achieve your painting dreams. They’ll give you vivid, deeply pigmented colors, a very pleasant buttery feel, as well as luminous finish to all of the layers made with any color.

The eight colors are versatile and allow you to mix almost anything out of them. Even though they aren’t the most obvious and popular colors, they will give you a large variety of tones.

Check it out on Blick

Daler-Rowney Georgian Oil Colors

Despite being very affordable, these oil paints still maintain very good quality. That’s what makes them popular around the world, and what makes this brand well-known. They will be a perfect option for beginners.

The set contains only six colors, but they still give a lot of mixing possibilities. They are the most basic ones, plus brown, white, and a tube of green for your landscapes. So you can basically make anything out of them.

Check it out on: Amazon or Blick

Premium Oil Paint, Set of 24 Colors

Arteza offers you a set with a huge variety of colors. This will be a wonderful option if you’re not interested in mixing or aren’t so sure about it yet. The shades are highly pigmented, vivid and juicy, just as they should be.

All of the tubes are easy to squeeze to control the flow of the paint. That actually saves you money, because you won’t run out of paints quicker than you should have. They’re also pleasantly thick and slow-drying.

Check it out on: Amazon or Arteza

Oil Painter’s Bundle

This bundle would be an amazing gift for someone who wants to dip their feet into the wild stream of oil painting. It includes 24 oil paints of various colors, mini canvases and mini easels.

It’s perfect for a start because it helps cope with the fear of a big empty canvas. You won’t have to build up an entire composition, small test paintings would be fine. All of the canvases are also pre-stretched and pre-primed, so you can start painting right away.

Check it out on Arteza

Extra items you’ll need for oil painting

In the case of oil paints, palettes, brushes, and gessoed canvases aren’t the only items you’ll have to own. Turpentine, or other thinning solution, is a must-have to clean your brushes with because you can’t wash regular oil off with water. You can buy odorless mineral solutions if you can’t stand the smell, but it’s still best to clean your brushes and use mediums in a well-ventilated area.

You will definitely require jars, with and without lids. The ones with lids would help you store your paints in fresh working condition until you’re done with your painting. The ones without lids would be required for cleaning your brushes. You can also buy a special jar with a coil at the bottom that will help you clean the brushes more effectively.

Paper towels, newspapers or rags are necessary for drying the brushes after cleaning. After all, you’d better take good proper care of your brushes to keep them working. Oils are hard to wash off, and if they dried up – the brush is dead to the world. You can also own and use a palette knife for particularly “chunky” and thick drawing style, but that won’t save you from cleaning.

Paint mediums are a large field for experiments, and they will add certain properties to your oil paints. So you might be interested in owning a few as well. Don’t worry, they aren’t too hard to use, and it’s really easy to understand what each one of them does to your paint.

Check out the list of 13 Must-Haves when Oil painting HERE!

We hope that this article helped you learn some important things and navigate more bravely in the world of oil painting. As you can see, it’s not that hard, and you just need to know exactly what you want. And the best way to find out what you prefer is to practice.

So get your kit of oil paints, arm yourself with all the necessary items, and go ahead. You’ll discover an entirely new world of beautiful thick paints. And once you find out what they’re capable of, you won’t be able to get away from oil painting.

Oil Paint Like a Pro

Also, if you would like to learn some neat tricks and tips when oil painting, I have a unique offer for you!

Get 2 FREE MONTHS OF SKILLSHARE by clicking on the link and search for “Oil Painting”. They have a bunch of amazing classes on oil painting that will help you get started and learn awesome techniques, tips and tricks!

Here is a screenshot of the latest search I did for oil painting: