divided by blue

For some time now, my painting teacher has been encouraging me to try oil paints. Since I started taking painting classes four years ago, I have exclusively painted with acrylic. Apart from some failed attempts in my youth, I have never done anything with oil paint.

In my youth, I was gifted a box set of Van Gogh oil paints for a series of drawings I created for my school (I painted with gouache back then). It was a lovely gesture, and I appreciated enormously this gift they gave me. Sadly, I didn’t have a painting teacher who could advise me, and YouTube didn’t exist yet. So I bought a book and tried it on my own. The book provided a wealth of information - too much information, in fact, for someone who knew nothing about it. It felt lost. I tried a few things, but didn’t use the right medium and techniques. It didn’t work out. I put the paints in a box and never touched them again.

Fast forward to 2025, when I’m at the end of my thirties. I’m not going to lie, the failed attempts in my youth trying out oil paint left a bad impression on me, that the medium was hard to use, that it wasn’t anything for me. It took me months of gentle encouragement from my teacher to finally give in and try it again. I searched for the old oil paints everywhere, but couldn’t find them. So I bought new ones (and then a week after my purchase, I found them again :) )

I decided to paint this portrait of Spanish Actress Natalia Sánchez (Begoña in Sueños de Libertad). It’s mostly painted wet in wet, ‘alla prima’, on a small canvas board. I painted without a medium, only with a bit of linseed oil.




I must say that this experience was very positive. I felt relaxed working on it. Thanks to the slow dry speed, you have more time to blend colors. The face was therefore a lot easier to get right. The hair, however, felt more challenging to do than acrylics. The fast drying speed of acrylics actually helps with hair, as you can wait till a layer is dry to add some individual hairs here and there.

I’m looking forward to doing another one of these. I set up a charcoal drawing on a larger canvas board to start painting on Monday in the painting course.