Category: Painting

  • Why everyone is afraid of oil paints

    When I started painting, I worked with acrylics for quite some time before I gathered the courage to try out oils. This is true for a lot of people I know. The stories of how a lot of professional artists got cancer from oil paints certainly doesn’t help. My first mentor (who is a professional…

  • How are paints made for various painting mediums?

    Paints are made by adding pigment (color) to something that will help it stick to the surface of a canvas (or anything else it can be painted on). Color Color, also referred to as pigment, is a powder with a specific color. For artist grade and premium grade paints this is ground up metal in…

  • Clean your oil painting brushes the non-toxic way

    Oxyclean stain remover is your friend. Wipe your brushes with a paper tower, then spray some Oxyclean into the bristles, leave it for a few seconds and wash them. You may need to use more than once on a brush but it will clean the brush and leave no color stains ( at least not…

  • Oil paints with fast drying time (but not too fast)

    As some of you know, I mostly used acrylic paints because they don’t take ages to dry (unlike some of my initial oil paintings which took almost a month to dry). Who wants to wait a month to varnish their painting? Or worse, some artists wait 6 months to a year. As annoying as the…

  • My latest painting

    Lately, I have been painting a lot of 8×10 paintings on canvas panels. They don’t take much time and you can keep the panel on your lap, or wherever you feel comfortable. Another advantage of doing an 8×10 inch painting is that you can experiment different with different techniques and see the result fairly quickly.…

  • Beware of the pouring medium

    Beware of the pouring medium mixed with water as it can destroy your painting. I had a painting I had been meaning to varnish for a few months and finally decided to do it 3 days ago. For isolation coat, I figured I would use the pouring medium sold by Liquitex. It levels itself and…

  • Oil vs Acrylic – What’s easier to clean?

    Acrylics are much easier to clean than oils (and cheaper). Brushes With acrylics, you can get away with using just water to clean your brushes (depending on how thick you laid your paint). Most of the times, this is true even for impasto techniques. For oils, you have to use turpentine (as oil paints don’t…

  • An unconventional painting

    Unconventional for me, anyway. This was the first time I painted on a wood plank. I think it came out alright. Here it is:

  • Hyper-realistic beaky beans

    While going through my books, I came across this painting/drawing/whatever-it’s-called I did quite some time ago. I was trying to paint a can of beans but I got the name wrong and a new type of beans were invented – the beaky beans. Here is the painting:

  • My misadventures with paint brushes and pig hair

    When I started painting about a year ago, I knew that I was not allowed to use any brush made of human hair (Islam forbids it to the best of my knowledge). Human hair was very common for soft brushes a few years ago so I took extra pre-cautions and made sure I didn’t buy…