All About Pet Portraits in Oils
Oils are a fantastic medium for painting pet portraits and animals. The ability to create soft backgrounds is the first plus point. With most other mediums, particularly acrylic, its difficult to achieve a soft and smooth coloured background behind the pet. However because of the drying time of oils, it allows us to modify over and over if needed. Depending on which brand of oils you purchase and use, they can be touch dry within a couple of days. This is perfect for pet portrait artists as it allows us to be able to paint and modify the background over a few hours, but it can be dry enough to add fine fur detail on the pet, in a few days without the background colour coming off onto your paint brush.
Of course during the time the paint is still wet, it enables us to blend the subject into the background so that we don't get a 'chopped off' feel, particularly when painting head studies. This is a very common mistake some of my students who are learning to paint and drawn animals make. They paint the background and then paint the pet on top and each don't feel as though they are part of the same picture. With oils, we can almost paint the pet and the background at the same time to marry the two together, and this coupled with using the correct colours will give you a great starting point.
Oil paints these days can be odour free, and are very easy to clean. In previous years many people who has allergies could not use them, but the new technology and ways of making the paints have really come forward and can use them with no ill effects. Many pet portrait artists do use oil paints and each artists styles vary greatly. This si fantastic as it really shows that this medium is capable of.
Cleaning your bushes after each use is very important. Paint brushes can be very expensive, particularly the larger brushes for use for on large areas of canvas. I tend to wash my brushes each evening and leave them to dry over night. I always start with a fresh pallet the following day as oxidisation to the paints left, even in an airtight container can change the consistency of the paints.
There are many surfaces you can paint on with oils too, not just for pet portraits but for any subject. I mainly use canvas board for my pet portraits that is already primed, however you can use gesso to prime pretty much any surface you can think of, as long as its able to hold the weight of the paint. Masonite is very popular, hardboard, mdf, and the more expensive woods are a perfect surface.
I think my advice would be if you were a beginner, not just in painting pet portraits but in any subject, would be to purchase some cheap canvas board, and experiment mixing your colours, experiment with the consistency of the paint, find out what its like to use without water, with a little water, experiment with the different mediums that you can mix with the paint that are on the market. Also test out large and small brushes and try to create flat tones, textured tones, solid shapes, play with colour, work out which colours recede and which come forward. Once you have this knowledge and are familiar with the medium of oils, you will then be ready to start painting full pet portraits and paintings. Good luck!
This is one of my oil pet portraits on canvas to the size of 24 x 18. If you would like to view more of my pet portraits please visit my pet portraits oil gallery .
