Painting wildlife and animals in oils can seem like a very daunting prospect for beginners and novice painters, but it needn't be. When you follow a few simple rules and procedures.

Oils the most forgiving medium

Beginners often perceive oil painting as a difficult medium, but actually it is one of the most forgiving. Over the years I have used just about everything, but always come back to oils. I find Acrylics just dry too fast, and you need many layers to get the coverage of oils. Watercolor is all about timing, put a wet color in to another wet color at the wrong time and you can have all manner of terrible things happen such as runbacks, bleeds etc. I have found watercolor to be by far the most difficult medium to master - particularly for beginners. Oils on the other hand give me enough time to relax as I think out the next stage and plenty of time if I want to blend one color in to another, when creating a nice smooth sky colour for instance.

The New Oil Paints

Also new developments with oil paint manufacture means that they can now dry over night - these are called Alkyd Oil paints and odorless thinners means that you don't have to stink the whole house out with the smell of turps, so there is no reason why a beginners 1st painting should not be done using oil / Alkyd paints.

Wildlife Art Secrets (what I learnt in 10 years)

Wildlife / Animal painting is very popular - lots of people would love to be able to paint their pet, or perhaps they had a special holiday in Africa and would love to paint their memories, but beginners can be disappointed with their 1st attempts at capturing animals. I know I was when I started to paint wildlife about 10 years ago - I read just about every book on the subject and watched lots of video footage as well, but they all seemed to have one thing in common - they left out the detailed instruction and jumped too many steps, it was quite frustrating. So I made a decision, I started my own website so that I could share my experiences with other artists as I learnt new techniques myself.

Over the years I have learnt many key secrets that helped to rocket my wildlife paintings from mediocre to professional standard. Such as - always having the under layers of fur and feathers darker so that you have something to lay the detailed fur on top of. How to make a chiseled edge on a round brush, essential for making realistic for marks and many more - to get that strong chiseled edge drag a large round brush through thick - undiluted oil paint - 1st one side, then the other.

Remember when starting out not to try your experiments out on your latest paintings or expensive canvases, this just puts too much pressure on you not to mess up - use cheap rolled canvas or canvas paper which is available from almost all art stores.

Learn more about this author, Jason Morgan.
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