Oil paint is a traditional artist’s medium. It is pigment mixed with such oils as linseed, safflower, or poppy, and thinned with turpentine. It should be used on supports that have been primed with gesso to protect the surface—which can even include paper—from the acid in the oil. Oil paint is slow-drying, so the paint can stay wet on the palette and workable on the painting for many days, making it easy to blend. Cleanup requires solvents such as turpentine or mineral spirits. Water-soluble oils have been introduced in recent years, requiring only water to thin the paints and clean the brushes. Watercolor paint is another traditional medium and uses pigment mixed with a binder made of gum arabic and additives to improve solubility and flow. It is water-soluble, transparent, and comes in a tube, pan, and liquid form. Watercolor paint can be reactivated with water when dry and reworked, even years after you finish your painting. The characteristics of watercolor—its convenience, portability, and easy cleanup—make it a very popular medium for both finished works as well as sketchbooks and visual journals. Acrylic paint is a more modern choice—it only recently became commercially available for artists in the 1950s. In acrylic paints, the pigment is suspended in a plastic polymer. It’s most notable for its quick drying time and can be used on almost any surface without priming. It’s water-soluble, making cleanup much easier (all you’ll need are soap and water). Acrylic dries into a durable, flexible, water-resistant surface. It is very versatile and can be used thinly like watercolors or more thickly like oil paints, depending on the desired effect. As a budding pastel painter, you will likely develop your own preferred brands, but until then, a few stand out or at least are worth a try. John Hersey’s handmade Unison pastels are perfect for beginners. With almost 400 different pastels—sold individually or as color-coordinated sets—you can add colors as you need them. Schmincke makes the most beautifully soft pastels available: With an almost buttery texture, they glide onto the surface of the paper, even over already heavily worked areas. Rembrandt soft pastels are excellent for line work and early layering in of color: These are probably the best pastels for starting a painting.
So, embrace the challenge, learn, and soon you’ll be mixing just the right tints, tones, and shades. And, if you don’t want to waste the paint by throwing it away, use it with some white to do a monochrome painting or value exercise. Value is another term for tone, which refers to how light or dark the colors are. A value exercise, then, involves working to create lighter or darker tones in your painting.
