Oil Painting on the iPAD
One of the most frustrating yet fun paints to use is oil paint. This medium offers dimension, ease and a spectrum of shades and ranges that can sometimes be hard to achieve with water color or acrylic. It is also very soft in appearance, allowing artists to recreate photo realistic artwork since watercolor and acrylic can sometimes be matte in appearance. In addition to that, oil paint takes ages to dry, which can be frustrating at first but can be used at an advantage of continuously modifying the artwork without scraping the entire canvas. And if you want to scrap the canvas, it just requires paint stripper rather than throwing the whole canvas away.
That being said, it is quite expensive. Cheap oil paint is almost never a real option even when someone is trying to learn because the medium will never behave or work like it is supposed to. So it is often suggested that one uses high quality oil paint, at the risk of breaking their bank account and potentially wasting really expensive paint.
If you can afford it, I recommend the purchasing an iPad. While the upfront cost is expensive, if you are an artist like me who likes to experiment with different art styles but doesn’t have endless space, or money for art supplies or can’t afford mistakes or unsatisfying work, the iPad is a great way to learn how to do art.
With the right apps of course. I recently discovered the oil paint brushes on Adobe Fresco, and I believe that they are a great alternative to oil paint. They come in all sorts of sizes, and the user can control the flow and mixing of the brush. The app also offers some realistic erasing features that model how one would smear paint or remove paint as if they are painting in real life.
Above is one of my drawing I did using the chunky oil paint brush in Adobe fresco. The texture of the petals is pretty similar to what you can achieve if you used real oil paint. The key is the brush strokes and how much mixing and flow you want your brush to have, which you would control even if you were painting in real life. I also enjoyed painting the sky, as that required mainly only three colors and the brush did an excellent job mixing the colors so that white would not just show as white but would blend in with the rest of the colors.
Another artwork was the one above, of cactus flowers. This again used similar approaches. However, it was difficult to do one stroke petals with this work, as that is a typical technique you would do with real paint. One drawback is that you cannot have multiple colors on one brush, so you really need to add colors one at a time which can be unrealistic to how you would typically paint. This does require learning more how to blend colors digitally to achieve that effect.
Overall, Adobe fresco oil painting is an excellent way for a beginner to learn how to oil paint for free and experiment different techniques. That way when you are ready, you can invest in real oil paint and translate those skills to the canvas, without the frustration of whether or not you wasted your thousands of dollars on art supplies.