Experimenting with Oil Techniques

James Gurney uses black and white oil paints to demonstrate some unusual techniques

If you’re new to a painting medium, sometimes it helps to experiment with just black and white. By ignoring color, you can reduce the variables and concentrate on the basic mechanics of paint mixing and handling. In this article, I’ll demonstrate six unusual painting techniques, including some familiar methods such as oiling up, and other approaches that are less common, such as palette knife blending and dabbing with waxed paper. One feature they all have in common is short drying time, which is suited to projects with tight deadlines.

I include three new dinosaur paintings in full color that use the techniques described in the black and white exercises. Learning these secrets will offer you a wider tool set for achieving an illusionistic paint surface, and you may find some of them useful in your own artwork, regardless of the subject matter you prefer to paint.

Pre-texturing with Modeling Paste 

Thick oil paint looks attractive, but it takes forever to dry, so what can you do? You can achieve the look of thick paint by pre-texturing the surface with a painterly impasto layer just after completing the pencil drawing.

On most oil paintings, I add this texture at the early stage, using acrylic matte medium and modeling paste mixed together in various combinations. Once that preliminary layer is thoroughly dry, I switch to oil paints. Even if I use the oils fairly thinly on top of that base texture, the final painting will appear to be thickly painted.

Materials 

Some of the materials I use for these demos include: