Practice is the best way to improve your oil painting skills. It has been said that you need to make at least one hundred paintings before you start to become fluent with oil painting. Creating all these practice paintings can cost a lot for supplies, so here are some easy ways to save money while learning to oil paint.
1. Use A Limited Palette For Practice Paintings
When I was in art school the first oil paintings we made were with a limited palette. Learning how to mix colors is a very important part of learning to oil paint, and with a limited palette, you will be forced to mix your paints to achieve your desired colors and shades.
The Zorn limited palette is Cadmium Red Light, Yellow Ocher, Ivory Black, and Titanium White. This is the best limited palette for beginners, especially if you want to practice painting people.
If you want a bit more color range, perhaps landscapes or still life are your favorite subjects, adding a couple more colors won’t break the bank. Using the colors from the Zorn Palette and replacing Ivory Black with Raw Umber, plus a deep blue such as Phthalo Blue, or Ultramarine Blue, will broadly expand your color palette, allowing you to achieve a wide range of colors in the color wheel.
There are countless options for limited palettes. Think about what you enjoy painting the most and try to find a limited palette with colors that fit your needs. I would suggest staying away from buying green tubes of paint because they are relatively easy to mix yourself, and predominately only useful for painting foliage. If you mix blue and yellow to make greens you have two other colors that can be used for many other subjects.
Orange and purple tubes of paint are also colors to avoid. They are not used in the pure straight-from-the-tube form very frequently, and they are both easy colors to paint if you stick to primary colors for your limited palette. Some examples of the primary colors in oil paint are Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow, and Manganese Blue.
2. Buy Student Grade Oil Paint
Even if you end up selling your studies, student grade paints of today are still pretty good quality. They are not going to crack or fade as much as paints from a hundred years ago, so this is a super good way to save money. You just want to get your practice in so don’t worry about the longevity of your early paintings.
Georgian is a great brand of paint for beginners, as is the Winton line of student-grade oil paints from Windsor Newton. Both of these brands are more affordable than professional-level oil paint.
Student-grade paints tend to have more medium and less pigment, therefore, when you do decide to start using professional-grade oil paints you won’t need to use as much in your mixes. Professional-level oil paints have a lot of pigment in them so it doesn’t take as much paint when mixing colors.
This oil paint set from Daler-Rowney of Georgian oil paints is a perfect set to get you started. You may never need more than the colors selected here! Click the image to check it out.
3. Painting Small To Save Money
Smaller canvas equals less money. Painting smaller will allow you to complete more paintings in less amount of time as well. If you want to get a lot of practice oil painting, then painting small is the best tip for saving time and money while you learn to paint.
Another way to paint small is to paint two or more paintings on the same canvas by dividing up the space into equal parts. You can use artists’ tape to divide up the painting area, or just make a line with a pencil and then paint over it.
4. Don’t Paint On Stretched Canvas
Even cheap premade canvases are more expensive than other surfaces. With a little preparation, you can oil paint on paper, cardboard, or even in a sketchbook. You can also buy a pad of canvas paper that requires no extra preparation.
Buying a pad of canvas paper is the best way to save money while practicing and learning to oil paint.
A pad of canvas paper will have a dozen or more pages and a small one can cost less than five dollars. That’s less than $0.50 per painting!
If you want to keep your studies all in one place, buying a sketchbook and priming the pages is a great way to store your paintings. This is likely not the fastest way, but you will have a nice collection of oil painting studies all in one place. Learn how to turn a sketchbook into an oil painting study collection in my post Can You Oil Paint In A Sketchbook?
Below I have given an example of a very budget-friendly pad of canvas paper that is ready to paint on right away.
5. Buy Cheap Brushes
When looking at oil painting brushes at an art store they can be very expensive, especially when buying them one at a time. There are many cheap brushes available that will get the job done well. I am a realist painter, and I am a bit pickier about my brushes, but I still look for the cheapest brushes I can find, with certain guidelines. My favorite place for cheap brushes is Jerrysartarama.com. Their in-house brand, Creative Mark, makes numerous styles of brushes for reasonable prices. You can also buy these on Amazon.
Watch out for short handle brushes, they are a little bit cheaper, but traditionally you will want long handle brushes for oil painting so that you can stand back a bit further from the canvas to get a greater perspective on your painting.
Buying cheap brushes is a delicate balancing act. You want to save money, but you don’t want brushes with brittle bristles, as they can break off into your paint palette or on your painting. It is a hassle to have to stop painting to pick a broken bristle off of your painting. For oil painting, you do want a stiffer bristle so that it is strong enough to push the full-bodied paint around.
I suggest these Creative Mark Pro Stroke as good quality entry-level oil painting brushes that will last for years if you take good care of them.
You Don’t Have To Spend A Lot To Get Started Oil Painting
Putting all these tips together can save you a lot of money for your first hundred paintings! As you progress in your practice you can always add in more paint colors, try different brands, and occasionally buy a stretched canvas when they are on sale. Eventually, when you start to sell your paintings, you will have the budget for fancier supplies.