Oil Painting

Impasto is a technique where the paint is applied on the canvas in thick layers. Because of this, the brush strokes become visible. If a painting knife is used - the scoops is kept visible on the canvas. Sometimes, the colors are mixed on the canvas instead of the palette.

Impasto is an Italian word for dough or mixture

Impasto technique can be easily achieved with oil painting because the colors are thick and slow drying. It can also be achieved with acrylic. It is difficult to do so with water colors with out the use of any thickening agent.

The technique is usually used for three purposes.

• Since it forms a bulged layer, the artist can make use of the shadow and highlight casted on the paint itself.
• Impasto can be used in modern art to convey mood and expression.
• The Impasto technique can make the painting step into the realm of three dimensional sculpting.

Impasto is simulated in some advanced raster graphic editors making them one of the choices for digital painting.

As soon as the second layer dried off, I started working on the third layer, for the “Unicorn” piece.

In this layer, I took the small brush, and applied paint almost directly out of the tubes.
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The first layer of ‘Unicorn’ had dried up and I did another layer.

I took a smaller brush and started to define the shapes of the Unicorn. I took a thicker medium - the linseed oil was more than the turpentine this time. It gave me a lot of time to work on the canvas, and did not dry up faster as the earlier layer.

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While I have been waiting for the first layer of the Unicorn to dry, I was mulling as to what can be done to quicken the drying process.

There seems to be many ways to quicken the drying process of the oil painting layer.  One is, the obvious use of solvents like turpentine to thin the oil paint.  The drying of oil paint on the canvas is actually a process where the chemicals get oxidized.  The turpentine creates a chemical reaction that quickens the process.

And searching over the net, I found the blog post by David Rourke: How to get oil paint to dry quickly

He lists several methods that can help us achieve it.

One of the tip that he gives, that I will try out soon, will be working on multiple oil paintings at the same time.  That way, even when you are letting a layer to dry up on one painting, you can paint other works.