Oil vs. Acrylic: Which is Better for Painting?
If you’re not new to painting, you probably already have a preference between oil and acrylic. It’s also possible that you’ve learned to paint using one medium, and haven’t ventured to try another. Maybe you never paint, but are just curious to learn about what you’re looking at.
I’ve never been one to be “on the fence” about anything in my life, and certainly have opinions about why I think OIL IS KING, in almost every way, over acrylic.
But here’s the thing…
I use both.
Acrylic dries with the speed of a majestic eagle, except that it is more like a really chunky bird that can’t quite nail a landing...but can do it really fast. That’s acrylic to me.
Oil with its luscious consistency, radiance, vibrancy and… perhaps best of all… room for error. You can change things, move the paint around after you’ve already laid it down. You can sculpt your paint. If you have commitment issues, you can scrape it off. Oil paint is forgiving… something we all probably need a little more of in our lives.
Oil painting stinks though, and some painters have trouble with that. It’s mostly when you are mixing it with something other than linseed oil, like with turpentine.
Linseed and other oil based mediums take longer to dry because it is the process of exposure to air which causes it to harden, something you can speed up only modestly using a heated room. I wouldn’t recommend putting your paintings in the sun since UV kills pigmentation. And if you are living somewhere very humid you might want to consider being an acrylic painter - or using liquin.
Different oil based mediums have different drying times, linseed considered to be in the middle range of drying speed (surprisingly) while other oils like walnut and safflower take even longer. Liquin and turpentine are overnight.
The turpentine smell is caused by hazardous fumes… which is why you want ventilation if you are going to use it. Even when using an odourless spirit you need ventilation. You can’t smell it, but the fumes are still there. Ghost fumes!
I personally love the smell and alchemy of mixing mediums. By the way, I don’t know who decided that “medium” (as in, the medium of oil or acrylic) and “medium” (as in, a medium you mix with oil or acrylic) are the same fucking word, housed in the same topic, making context hardly a way to distinguish what you mean! Annoying!
Back to the stink… I’ve recently switched from using a medium recipe that included turpentine and damar… to “Chelsea’s fat & lean” mediums. That was thanks to a short course with Layne Johnson who brought to my attention the fact that...hey, yeah! I am totally getting regular headaches! (I have a small studio with terrible ventilation). Take care of ya health, kids!
Ok so here’s my quick run down. This is what I do. Yes oil is king, but acrylic helps to speed up your creation process like TENFOLD, which is a massive benefit if you plan on living off your art… but it also depends on how you paint.
I feel like everything I mention is like a can of worms in and of itself and could be it’s own blog post, but I’ll just leave you with this helpful tip: knock out all the white of the canvas with acrylic by blocking the bulk of your painting in.
Congrats! You’ve now smashed out like 30% of the painting process WAY QUICKER than you could have done in oil. Thanks to this important difference: you can keep working NOW! Not tomorrow (Liquin), not next week (linseed oil) not the week after that (walnut oil). All without your painting colours turning to mud.
You can either continue to work in acrylic and refine your painting even more, or you could choose to switch to oil and start refining that way. I guarantee just by painting that first 30% in acrylic you’ve saved yourself lots of time.
I like to do as much as I can in acrylic before switching to oil, if I even decide to switch. I am slowly getting better at refining my images in acrylic, and find it less necessary to move onto oil. That comes with time, acrylic dries so fast, it is more like using a marker instead of a pencil.
Ultimately, you just need to go with what feels right. Anyway this is all just my opinion, I wish you all lots of success and if you completely disagree with everything I just said then let me know!
Love Ash
“At the Soundless Dawn” 2019 - painted entirely in acrylic. I used Golden’s satin glazing medium and I highly recommend to use that over water when glazing in acrylic.
PS. Every painting I do begins with just 4 colours. I map out the image tonally to avoid confusion (colour is confusing!) The paints I use are these, Golden fluid acrylics: Titan buff (I use this instead of Titanium white, which I only reserve for when I really want the whites to POP!), Shading grey, Van dyke brown and burnt sienna.
Happy painting
Written by Ash Darq, with special thanks to my editor Visaic