Oil paint: patience instead of speed
Why oil is built in layers, and why we work from dark to light.
February 2026 · 1 min read
Oil dries slowly, and that is its greatest gift. You can blend colours on the canvas for hours and soften edges. Unlike pastel, here haste is the enemy.
The classical method is to start from a thin dark underpainting, then lay the lights over it layer by layer. Light is always the last thing to arrive.
