Oil paintings are often created on a diverseness of surfaces known every bit supports. Materials such equally canvas, panels, paper, wood, metallic, and various others can be used.
Note: The surface is called a support because it "supports" the medium used to pigment the image.

Below are some interesting bullet points nigh the more common types of oil painting surfaces.

Types of Oil Painting Surfaces Stretched Sail is:

  • the most common support for oils used past modern-day artists.
  • a tightly woven flexible fabric made from cotton, linen, or other synthetic material stretched across a wooden or metal stretcher bar frame.
  • can be purchased already primed and stretched onto stretcher bars, or information technology tin can be purchased in bulk rolls that the artist cuts up into smaller pieces and stretches onto the frame.
  • comes in 3 varieties of textures—

Fine: actress smooth surface for finely detailed paintings, such equally portraiture.
Medium: assuming texture surface for expressive paintings with broad brushstrokes, like the Impressionists.
Rough: abrasive "toothy" surface to enhance adhesion for collage.
Note: The more refined the sheet texture is, the less the surface of the sheet will show through in your finished painting.

Types of Oil Painting Surfaces Canvass Panel Board is:

  • a rigid surface covered with primed sail glued onto paper-thin.
  • are easier to frame than stretched canvases.
  • easier to store and travel with since it takes upwards less room than stretched canvases.
  • also is more than durable and less easily damaged than stretched canvases.
  • preferred by many artists for their smaller paintings.
  • an platonic choice for painting on location considering they are lightweight, and also sunlight will not polish through the dorsum.

canvas paper Canvas Paper is:

  • a flexible surface primarily used for minor sketches, color notes, and other purposes.
  • not a good surface to paint on because it is too frail and will not concluding through the years.
    Annotation: Works painted on canvas paper must undergo extreme restorative and bourgeois treatments, usually within a few decades.
  • available in various paper qualities—

100% cotton wool: pinnacle of the quality scale, the newspaper is fabricated entirely of cotton.
Rag newspaper: some rag content is included in the paper, oftentimes mixed with forest cellulose.
Wood-free or high alpha cellulose or wood sulfite: the highest grade of wood lurid paper.

fine art wood panel board Wood Panel Canvas is:

  • a rigid surface for artists made from poplar, oak, linden, pine, cedar, or various other hardwoods, like mahogany or walnut
    Annotation: Other types of forest these panels are made from include plywood, fiberboard, Masonite, and particleboard.
  • the best for painting when they are well seasoned, air-dried quarter-sawn hardwoods to avert warping, shrinking, as this causes them to hold paint better
    Note: Woods panels need to be well-aged to prevent shrinking and warping from exposure to the water content nowadays in some paints.

metal fine art panel boards Metal Console Sail is:

  • a rigid surface that requires an oil primer to prepare it to support artist paints.
    Note: This type of surface does not fair well with liquid (water base) primers.
  • comes in various types of fine art metals — aluminum, brass, and copper.

Hopefully, this concise article will provide a little bit of information regarding the many types of oil painting surfaces available to the creative person.

Additional Reading

Types of Canvas Available for Painting

About Creative person Stretcher Bar Frames

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UPDATED: nineteen Jan 2020

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