Oil, TEmpera & Acrylic Painting

What is Acrylic paint?

Acrylic paint is a fast-drying paint made of pigment suspended in acrylic polymer emulsion and plasticizers, silicon oils, defoamers, stabilizers, metal soaps. Acrylic paints are water-soluble, but become water-resistant when dry.

Depending on how much the paint is diluted with water, or modified with acrylic gels, mediums, or pastes, the finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor, a gouache or an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media.

What is Oil Paint?

Oil paint is a type of slow-drying paint that consists of particles of pigment suspended in a drying oil, commonly linseed oil. The viscosity of the paint may be modified by the addition of a solvent such as turpentine or white spirit, and varnish may be added to increase the glossiness of the dried oil paint film.

Oil paints have been used in Europe since the 12th century for simple decoration, but did not begin to be adopted as an artistic medium until the early 15th century.

The 5 Key Differences between Acrylics vs Oil paints

1. Do you work quickly or slowly?

Acrylic Pros: You can paint on anything.

  • This is one of the key things that make acrylics a great medium to start with when beginning to learn to paint. To be able to set up quickly, start painting on anything is brilliant. Paper, card, canvas board, whatever you have to hand.

Acrylic Cons: They dry quickly, I mean really quickly.

  • You want to do some painting, so you book in a little me time. You’ve got a canvas ready, you’ve prepared your ground and now you’re ready to paint.
  • All is quiet and at peace with the world. You carefully squeeze out your paintings, being careful not to use too much, and then what happens?
  • The phone rings.
  • Wrong number.
  • In this short amount of time, the first blob of paint you’d squeezed out will now be dry, solid, unable to shift. So you scrape it off, squeeze out some more, ready to go and…
  • A knock at the door.
  • You put down your brushes, come back 10 minutes later and everything has dried! Not quite the tranquil painting experience you had imagined.
  • The solution?
    • Squeeze out more paint
    • Add a retarder to keep the acrylics wet for longer (no more than 15% or the paint goes funny)
    • Use a stay wet palette to keep the paints moist. See my video on How to set up a stay wet palette.

Oil Pros: Longer working time.

  • Because oil paints stay wet for a lot longer than acrylics, it gives you the flexibility to start a painting and then come back to it the next day and continue straight where you left off. The paint on the palette will still be wet and pliable; the colors on your canvas can still be blended together.

Oil Cons: Preparation is key

  • Due to the oil in oil paints (usually linseed oil) its best to on work on a prepared canvas or board. If you are going to prepare the surface of the canvas yourself the preparation time is longer. You could, of course, buy a pre-primed canvas and get going straight away. (see: preparing a surface for painting)

2. Do you like subtle blends or hard lines?

Acrylic Pros: A Crisp edge

  • The crisp edges that can be achieved with acrylics can be hugely beneficial if you paint with a more graphic composition. You can mask out areas, work over them quickly, and easily cover a hard shape with thicker paint. You can mix clean, bright colors very easily.

Acrylics Cons: Achieving a smooth blend

  • Blending with acrylics can be frustrating due to the speed of the drying time. Especially if you are working on a large-scale it can be practically impossible to work the canvas as a whole to bring it all to the same finish together.
  • This is for a size of say 6ft x 4ft. If you are working smaller than this you can create some lovely blends.
  • You can achieve smooth blends with acrylics you have to work quickly. You can add a medium to the paint to help keep the working time open for longer. Either use soft gel gloss, retarder (slows down drying time) or my preferred choice, glazing liquid gloss.

Pro tip:

I use the glazing liquid gloss even if I don’t need a gloss finish. This is because the matting agent used in the matt glazing liquid is white when wet, it dries pretty clear but I have found it can sometimes leave the blacks looking milky)

Oil Pros: smooth blending

  • Oil paints are king of the ring when blending colors together. Because of the slow drying nature of oil paints they can be fantastic for creating subtle blends.
  • Working wet-into-wet is the sure-fire way to get a smooth transition in your painting. This is especially true for portrait painting when the subtle shading of the face can need constant revisiting and tweaking. You can also add slower drying oils to your paints to create surfaces that can stay wet for weeks.

Oil Cons: Work a little, wait a while.

  • Trying to create a crisp edge without it affecting the underlying colors with oils means you have to wait until the next day, or touch dry otherwise your brushstroke will pull and mix with the paint underneath it. It is very easy to mix ‘muddy colors’ when starting with oils due to everything staying wet and the colors mixing together on the canvas.
  • Solution: Experience teaches you to work cleanly.

3. Color shift

Acrylic Pros: They are lightfast

  • With projected laboratory tests acrylics won’t fade in time, the colors will look the same now as they will in 200 years. The binder in oil paint – oil, goes yellow over time, this causes the subtle glow on old master paintings with acrylics they are colorfast, the binder – acrylic polymer doesn’t yellow over time.
  • Pro tip: The most likely cause of fading is using pigments that are not lightfast, this is true of oils and acrylics.

Acrylic Cons: They change color when they dry.

  • The binder used in acrylics is usually white but dries clear (the recent binder in Winsor & Newton Artists’ Acrylics is clear, but I feel still has a slight color shift) This means it seems lighter on the canvas when you first put in on and then dries darker as the white binder turns clear.
  • This becomes really clear when painting portraits. You think you’ve cracked the precise color, turn around and the color has changed. With practice, you can learn to judge to shift but it can be disconcerting when you’re first beginning.
  • If you add more acrylic polymers to the paint, in the form of mediums (quick-dry mediums, flow release medium) the color shift will be even greater.
  • If you use student quality paints that have extra fillers added, which are often white, the color shift will be more pronounced.

Oil Pros: No immediate color shift.

  • Initially, oils stay the same color when painted on a canvas. However, once the color dries it can appear to change if the oil from the paint ‘sinks in’ to the canvas.
  • This can lead to some areas being glossy (still have the oil in) and others staying matt (oil has soaked into the underlayer) to produce a deader color. To overcome this, you have to “oil out’ the area of the painting you are working on. A paint surface can appear dull and is usually caused by too little oil in the paint film due to the absorption into the ground layer (or overuse of thinners such as turpentine)
  • Pro tip: In classical painting, you build an oil painting up in layers and one of these layers is called the ‘dead coloring layer‘ It is painted using oil paint thinned with turpentine on an absorbent gesso ground, this soaks up the oil, speeds the drying time and gives a local color to the painting.

Oil Cons: Yellowing

  • Oil paints will have a slight yellow tinge to them due to the color of the oil (think of olive oil) As oil dries over time through the process of oxidation additional yellowing takes place. This varies in degree depending on the binder used in the paint.

4. Do you like working with thick paint or thin layers?

Acrylic Pros: Acrylics are flexible.

  • If you like the idea of using a palette knife and creating thick, impasto paintings, acrylics could be the choice for you. You can paint thickly, build it up and the paint will dry. If you try to achieve the same with oils the outer surface will dry to the touch but the inner paint will still be wet.
  • You can also work very thinly with transparent glazes or very thickly with a mountain of paint but the actual surface quality of the acrylic remains flexible, this means your painting won’t crack over time. Thin coats of acrylic paint can be used to give a watercolor look to a picture.
  • Pro tip: Acrylics can crack but usually only in extremely cold temperatures.

Oil Pros: Long drying times

  • If you have plenty of time set aside for your painting, oils can be fantastic. You can work with thick paint, wait a couple of days for that paint to dry then add thin glazes to create luminosity in your work.

Oil Cons: To work with thick paint you need to take into account the drying time of oils.

  • Each particular pigment needs a different amount of oil mixed with it resulting in different drying time, e.g: Earth colors such as Burnt Umber is a rapid dryer whereas Ivory black takes much longer to dry.
  • The solution: Add a siccative to the paint. A siccative is a medium that helps to speed up the drying process in oil paints. Traditionally this was a cobalt drier, more recently, Liquin by Winsor & Newton is a synthetic medium that can accelerate the drying time of the oil paint by about 50% .

Pro tip:

  • Its best always to work in a well-ventilated area when using liquin (Wikipedia link) as some people can have sensitivities to the Petroleum Distillates used in the product.

5. Do you work in a small space?

Acrylic Pros:

  • Acrylics can be a great alternative to oils if you’re working in a confined space. You just need access to water and they have a very low odor in comparison to traditional oil painting thinners.

Pro tip:

Oil Cons: The smell of turpentine

  • If you start painting with oils in a confined space the fumes from the thinners can overwhelm you, turpentine and white spirit can be really strong. White spirit can also be an irritant to the skin and turpentine rags can spontaneously combust!
  • I work with odorless mineral spirits or ‘Zest It‘ (a thinner made from citrus ) that have a very little odor compared to turpentine.
  • There are many new solvent-free gels now coming to market, such as Gamblin’s Solvent-free Gel. These offer a way of diluting the oil paint without using traditional solvents. You can also clean your brushes with walnut oil (Murphy’s soap in the US gets good reviews).

Pro tip:

  • The odorless mineral spirit does not cut through the oil as well as pure artist turpentine and if you are using Dammar varnish in your mixes can cause problems.


500+ year old Oil Painting

Leonardo Da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi, 1481, detail

60 year old Acrylic Painting

Idelle Weber, Munchkins, I, II, & III, 1964

Is it oil or is it acrylic? A skilled artist can make one medium look like the other, and it comes from PRACTICE!

Acrylic

Bill by Michael Wagner

Oils

Cafe Terrace by Vincent Van Gogh

Oils

Cliff Dwellers by George Bellows

ACrylic

Black Grassland by Lee Jong-gu

ACrylic

Utility Pole by Jim Martinez

Oils

Western Kansas by Albert Beirstadt

So, how do I start? What do I choose???

If you're just starting out, it’s important to remember that a good painting requires good drawing skills first. Whether you’re using oil paint or acrylics, having a great drawing foundation is probably the best guarantee of success in the world of painting.

But assuming you’re already confident with your drawing skills, here are some reasons to choose acrylic paint over oil (and vice versa).

  1. Drying Time

The main difference between oils and acrylics is drying time. Acrylic paint will dry within an hour, if not within fifteen minutes. Oil paints will stay wet for days or weeks, depending upon the humidity and temperature of your location.

That's why I don’t always recommend that beginners choose acrylics—I, for one, am a slow painter, and if I had started out with a fast-drying paint, I might have become very frustrated with it. There are some retarders available which slow down the drying time of acrylics, but only for a few hours at most.

That said, some folks like to paint fast. So this one’s a toss-up, with no clear winner. It just comes down to what you prefer.


2. Mixing paint

Drying time influences so many other aspects of painting! Mixing acrylics is more difficult than mixing oils, simply because the acrylics are already beginning to dry. With oils you can mix colors for days on end, producing subtle color variations that you won’t have time to make with acrylics.

When it comes to mixing paint, I think oils are the clear winner.


3. Clean up (and toxicity)

You’ll also need to clean your brushes quickly after finishing painting with acrylics—within a half-hour, those bristles will be full of dried paint.

That said, you can clean acrylic paint with plain old water. Oil paints require Turpentine or Mineral Spirits (both of which can be harsh on skin, and contain fumes) and it’s a much longer process. Here’s a quick look at cleaning oil brushes to give you some idea.

For clean-up, acrylic edges out oils in my opinion.


4. Longevity

When it comes to longevity, oil paints have survived for hundreds of years, so their long-lasting quality is well known. Your oil painting could be around for 500 years! That being said, oil paints can discolor with age if not taken care of properly, something that acrylics don’t seem to do, although acrylics haven’t been around long enough for us to really know.

Oils have a proven track record, and the way they dry (essentially they “cure” rather than dry like acrylics) makes them my choice for longevity.


5. Color

Typically you’ll find that oil paints have more pigment in them, allowing richer, more vivid colors. Acrylic colors can also darken slightly as they dry, which means that the color you mixed may not be the exact color that ends up on the canvas.

Oils get the win on this one as well.


6. Cost

Oil painting supplies are more expensive than acrylics, so for students or hobbyists, it’s much easier on the pocketbook to stick with acrylic paints. As a bonus, you can use acrylic paints two ways: right out of the tube like oils, or diluted with water which lets you use them in an entirely different way, almost like watercolors.

Acrylics are much more budget-friendly for sure, especially if you pick student-grade acrylics to start out.


Is oil paint the right choice for you?

If you’re a slow painter, deliberate and cautious (perhaps used to spending hours on a single drawing) then I’d recommend oils. You’ll need to prop the windows open and wear your paint clothes, but at least you won’t have to rush.


A starter set of oil paint from Blick will cost about $30, and you can expect to pay $8-$10 for each natural hair bristle brush you purchase—you’ll probably want three or four of those at least.


To save a little money, make your first few paintings on paper instead of canvas. Just pick up some gesso to coat your paper with first, and don’t forget that Turpentine for cleaning up. (It’s available at any hardware store for much cheaper than your typical art supply store).


Or is acrylic the way to go?

If you’re concerned about toxicity of the paint, whether around children or pets (or yourself), acrylics might be the choice for you. An acrylic paint starter set will cost less than $15 for 12 colors, but you may end up needing to invest in some extras as well, like retarders, pastes, and gels, for the biggest possible range of texture and drying time available.


Brushes won’t set you back as much either, since you can use synthetic hair brushes for acrylic paint—they typically cost from $5-8 per brush. And the cleanup is free if you’ve got running water.


As you can see, acrylics ARE cheaper. Sometimes oil paintings will sell for more (making it worthwhile), but that’s really not a sure thing. If money is the bottom line, you’ll save a lot by avoiding high end oils.


If you can find an artist willing to let you dabble a bit with their paint before you make your decision, that will help a lot. Then just purchase the best paints you can afford.


All that aside...… remember that this is your opportunity to work with what you want to use, and you don't have to invest MUCH into it.

Tempera Paint