Flower paintings

Landscape paintings

People/ theme paintings

An Intro to Oil Painting

Oil painting has carved a niche for itself over long years. The fascinating aspect of oil painting is that it is long lasting ( you can say ever lasting infact, it will be good even after 50-70 years) and quite vibrant.

Even for the artist, oil painting makes an excellent choice owing to its ability to seamlessly blend various shades of contrasting colors. The transition from one shade to another and one piece of painting to another is totally evasive to the viewer. The viewer can only see the object in the painting as a real 3-d existing one and lose himself into the painting. Oil painting provides a great scope for creating wonderful visual effects.

Coming to the technicalities of oil paiting for a novice, all you need is an oil painting sheet (this is different from the regular drawing charts) or a canvas, oil paints (preferably tubes), oil medium (linseed oil is a good choice, can be teamed up with turpentine here and there for fast drying, though) and a set of brushes (round brushes are good to start with).

Plot your object on the paper/ canvas in a rough sketch, mix the colors appropriately and spread them on the sheet and start blending and lo! your oil painting is done! However be cautious while letting the paiting dry. It ususally takes a week to a few months depending on the thickness of color used, but make sure the painting is untouched.

You are now done with your first piece of oil painting!

Painting as a hobby

Painting can be a great hobby. If you have that artistic bent of mind and love to splash colors on paper, you are at the right place now!

Well, you like painting. But you don't know where to start- what to paint and how to paint. More importantly, you don't know what to do with those paintings.

Once you have learnt how to paint and are able to reproduce on paper what you have in mind, you are almost ready to embark into painting as a hobby.

Paintings are good pieces for home and office decors these days. All sizes of paintings, once they are well framed decorate the walls, giving them a fresh, new look. For this reason, paintings make excellent choices for gifts. The best part here is, paintings are very customizable. They can be made to suit every occasion, be it marriage, birthday, farewell, welcome parties, to name a few.

Framing your paintings is one important activity. Framed paintings look all the more elegant for decoration purposes. By framing, you can ensure that your art work is well preserved, exhibitable and damage free. The price of framing varies according to size, type of framing, i.e with/ without mounting (mounting is the additional plain space around your painting inside the frame, or inner wide plain border at the centre of which, sits your painting), frame type (plain frame or any fancy worked frames) etc.

If you think framing is bit of a costly affair for a beginner like you, you may preserve your paintings by getting them laminated.

Once you start making more paintings, you may showcase them in a gallery, or make an album of them or sell your work to people.

Either way, painting is a hobby that is highly potent to promote self satisfaction and to even generate revenue.