Up until this point, my medium of choice for painting has always been acrylics due to its low toxicity, lack of fumes, easy clean up and fast drying time.
However one of its main advantages is also one of its main disadvantages.
Because it dries quickly, it can become tacky on your palette making it hard to use and can ruin your brushes if not cleaned thoroughly. Blending can also be frustrating due to this rapid drying time, especially when working on a large scale. You can achieve smooth blends with acrylics but you have to work quickly.
Recently, this issue has made me consider whether I should look at using oil paints because oil paints stay wet for a lot longer than acrylics, giving 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 and the colours on your canvas can still be blended together. Unfortunately the idea of working with thinners and turps around my young kids doesn’t sit well with me so oils never really felt like a viable option.
Enter water mixable oils which on the surface seem like they could be the answer to my concerns and offer the best of both worlds.
Water mixable oils are real oils, only water-mixable, not water-based. Like traditional oils, water mixable oils dry through oxidation – absorbing oxygen through the air and once dry are treated like any other oil painting. The only difference between water mixable oils and traditional oils is that the oil vehicle has been modified to make it soluble in water, eliminating the necessity for turpentine or other dangerous solvents to thin paint and clean brushes and other supplies.
This may be the little nudge I needed to try oil paints. I’ll give these water mixable oils a try and will find out if this medium turns out to be a good fit for me.
Who ever said that oil and water don’t mix?
